The advantages of SSDs are clear: they’re exponentially faster, they’re entirely silent, they’re more durable, and they’re immune from issues like fragmentation.Īs with any new technology, they were fairly rare until recently because of their high prices. Unlike their disk-based predecessors, SSDs are more like a series of very high performance USB keys squished together. It’s like having a series of very high performance USB keys squished into a box. This is broadly true, and I will show you how to check for and enable TRIM support on your drives, but first it’s important to take a step back and understand what we’re talking about.Īn HDD encodes data onto a magnetic coating on a spinning disk inside the drive.Īn SSD, on the other hand, is just a network of flash memory cells assembled into a drive enclosure, meaning it has no moving parts. You’ve probably heard that SSDs have a lifespan, and that you can prolong that lifespan by enabling something called TRIM.

How to Check and Enable TRIM on a Mac SSD SSDs vs. Second rate people hire third rate people.How to Check and Enable TRIM on a Mac SSD “First rate people hire other first rate people. The trimforce utility first appeared in OS X 10.10.4, Yosemite. Although this successfully maintained performance even under operating systems that did not support trim, it had the associated drawbacks of increased write amplification and wear of the flash cells.Īfter a TRIM command has been issued and garbage collection has taken place, it's highly unlikely that even a forensic scientist would be able to recover the data. TRIM is designed to allow the operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.īy around 2014, many SSDs had internal background garbage collection mechanisms that worked independently of trimming. Trimforce will exit with status 0 if successful, or with an appropriate error if it cannot parse input, allocate memory, or is unauthorized to perform its work. SyntaxĮnable Start sending TRIM commands to AHCI-attached third-party drives.ĭisable Stop sending TRIM commands to AHCI-attached third-party drives. Enable TRIM commands on third-party solid-state drives.

Force enable trim mac os