Figures quoted for that number range between 3,000-5,000, and may exceed that in modern higher-quality SSDs. Whilst TRIM centres on write performance of an SSD, wear levelling is all about preventing an SSD from wearing out prematurely.Įach erasable block in an SSD has a finite number of erase cycles before it becomes unreliable. The trimforce command doesn’t have a verb which will inform you either. But no information on TRIM support is given for the most common connection for external SSDs, USB 3.1. This is given in System Information when you select that SSD according to its connection. The man page warns: “Use extreme caution when enabling TRIM, as some drives may not correctly handle the commands.”Īs far as I can see at present, looking in System Information and Disk Utility, you can only tell whether TRIM is enabled on certain SSDs, including those mounted internally or connected via buses such as Thunderbolt 3 which seem to pass this information.
#Trim enabler vs trimforce mac
The command that you’ll then need to use isįollowed by restarting your Mac for it to take effect. I’ve been unable to find any recent recommendation from Apple or a similarly authoritative source that TRIM support should be enabled on internal or external SSDs running the current version of APFS.įor the moment, in the absence of any better information, I suggest that it’s wise to buy external enclosures and drives which can support TRIM, but not to enable it unless you observe slowed write performance on your SSD. Most accounts of TRIM and its support are now getting quite old, and don’t refer to file systems such as APFS which are optimised to work with SSDs. I have yet to see any reports that external SSDs in APFS format need TRIM to be enabled because write performance has deteriorated, although the default in macOS appears to be to disable TRIM support for external SSDs. In practice, it shouldn’t be hard to detect poor write performance on an SSD which could be addressed by enabling TRIM. In early releases of APFS, users who manually enabled TRIM sometimes encountered longer boot times, which have been attributed to TRIM commands being sent to the SSD during the boot process.
#Trim enabler vs trimforce software
While generally available for software RAID systems, except AppleRAID, the TRIM command is normally not supported by hardware RAID systems.Įnabling TRIM doesn’t automatically improve performance, and in some circumstances can instead impair performance. Operating systems, including macOS, gained TRIM support around 2010, but this has proved quite complex and varied by type of SSD, and by file system.
#Trim enabler vs trimforce free
This allows the SSD controller to erase that block, and maintains good write performance even under heavy use with limited free space. To avoid incurring such overhead, the operating system can maintain a list of blocks which are no longer in use, and once a block becomes unused, it can inform the SSD’s firmware that the block can now be re-used. This is commonly addressed by relocating any other retained data within the block, so enabling that block to be erased ready to receive the new data. This is complicated by the fact that data is written in pages of 4-16 kB, but erase commands always affect complete blocks, which typically consist of 128-512 pages. However, before NAND flash memory cells used in SSDs can be re-used for writing, their contents must be erased, a process which makes writing to them significantly slower. When re-using those blocks for new files only requires that they are rewritten, as on a hard disk, that’s not a problem, as the disk controller can choose to reuse them whenever it wants without any side effects. On any storage medium, the file system normally deletes files by marking their storage blocks as being no longer in use. This isn’t an abbreviation, but refers to the TRIM command, which is central to this issue. With many Mac users switching from hard disk storage to SSDs, and following my recent article about adding a two-SSD external enclosure, I thought it might be useful to look at some commonly-raised issues about SSDs: TRIM, wear levelling, and how they interact (or don’t) with macOS, particularly APFS.
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