TRIM Support for SSDs

Mac
#1

Continuing the discussion from Tuesday Morning News:

Totally off topic, but reading this story led to me reading about TRIM again.

In my case I’ve got two non-apple SSD’s floating around currently. a SATA drive just installed in a 2012 Mac Mini and a mSATA (is that the form factor??) drive in a 2011 MBA.

On the Mini I had to manually enable TRIM support, which seems to have worked without issue, I don’t remember on the MBA if I needed to enable it, if I enabled it… or if it’s on now or not :stuck_out_tongue: Something I can confirm later.

I did an SSD upgrade on my old 2009 17" MBP (and miss the form factor, but that’s a whole different story) and recall having issues/concerns over if I should enable TRIM (questions on compatibility with the SSD’s chipset) and what the impact of not having it turned on would mean. There was some discussions with @bennyling at the time saying that TRIM shouldn’t be turned on … but the link is dead and I don’t recall what the specific issues were. That said, it was 2011 so things have likely changed significantly since then. All I really remember about that upgrade and the settings used was that the life expectancy was still many years even factoring in the very bad things™ that might effect longevity.

So fast forward to 2016. TRIM still sounds like a good thing, and despite the Apple warnings they now give you an official way to turn it on. But what is the actual impact to not having it turned on when we are talking modern drives with modern drive speeds? Everything I read seems to explain how it works, mention the warning but essentially say turn it on. There is the vague warning that extra writes are required without TRIM which shortens the life of the SSD although there is the question of “how much”? If we are talking 1 year instead of 5 it matters far more than 5 years instead of 10 years.

There also seems to be some feedback which says OSX doesn’t appear to suffer as badly as Windows machines.

Has anyone been running an SSD without TRIM for a long period who can talk about it?

Or point to a more modern article that talks about these things?

#2

I ran an OWC Mercury Pro for about 3 years without TRIM. Once TRIM enabler came out I started activating it and have been running with TRIM for about 2 years now. My SSD is definitely slow with and without TRIM enabled. Not sure if having TRIM from day 1 would have prevented this, or whether it is simply a sign that my SSD is getting long in the tooth now.

#3

I’ve run it both on and off on various machines both genuine and hacked and noticed little difference in performance. I was under the impression it was more of a long term reliability issue than just straight up performance. I haven’t had any SSD’s long enough to tell if they are degrading, the snappiness is just so great i would never go back to a magnetic drive regardless.

#4

I think TRIM is about both reliability and performance, especially in the long-term. Most modern SSDs have some kind of garbage collection built into the controller, which means TRIM matters less than it did orginally, although it still helps.

But as for how much of a difference it’ll make in the long term? Your guess is as good as mine — I don’t think I’ve owned an SSD for longer than about three years.

#5

Hi Benny I had a local service company do an upgrade to 256 Gb SSD on my 2009 iMac, replacing the 500 Gb HDD provided with the iMac. I questioned him about fans and trim and he stated No NEED.

#6

Hi all,

I was intrigued by the TRIM arguments mounted on both sides of the debate, plus comments from two local apple service agents.

With a little bit of help I came across this app on the web.

http://exirion.net/ssdfanctrl/

It works and seems to get over the problem of replacing the spinning platter with an ssd

#7

Yep, fan noise is definitely an issue when replacing a hard drive in an iMac with an SSD for more recent models of iMac, but it’s quite separate topic to general TRIM support on SSDs in Macs.

#8

Hi Benny,

Very interesting you should say that.

However all SSD’s have some sort of filing control on them these days.

Also TRIM seems to be a form of defragmenting and I thought this was a part of the Apple OS processes.

Also I watched a video on Utube which states TRIM is a only defragging and is not required.

For a non IT person TRIM is therefore a problem.

Col

#9

Hi All,

Had another look at the Apple website and it recommended enabling TRIM on all but one third party SSD.
On this basis I followed the Apple process and enabled TRIM via the IOS.
No issues at this early stage, probably two weeks post enabling

#10

The web’s a big place. Mind sharing a link to what you read to enable Trim?

#11

Hi Benny,

Sorry about that one link as follows:

#12

That’s an old article which you shouldn’t bother with if you’re running a current version of OSX. Since 10.10.4 you can turn on TRIM by using one simple command line:

sudo trimforce enable

…follow the prompts… and done.

Here’s an article talking about it if you want to read the details in 10.10.4+

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