Apple released OS X 10.10.4 on Tuesday, which was a mostly under-the-hood mix of bug fixes and performance enhancements. Ars Technica reports that one of those enhancements is TRIM support for third-party SSD hard drives.
The third-party SSD support was widely expected to arrive in OS X El Capitan, Apple’s upcoming new version of OS X. However, it looks like Apple jumped the gun a bit, and included it in OS X 10.10.4.
With today’s OS X 10.10.4 update, however, Apple has added a command line utility that can be used to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs without having to download and install anything. Called
trimforce, the utility can be executed from the OS X terminal, and it requires a reboot to start working.
TRIM is a system-level command that allows the drive and operating system to track which areas of a hard drive are marked as unused, and can therefore by erased and written to. If TRIM is not enabled, users can experience significantly slower drive write speeds as the hard drive begins to fill up. Until now, TRIM in OS X was limited to Apple’s own OEM SSD’s. Third-party apps were previously required to enable TRIM for third-party SSD’s.
As seen in the above screenshot, a user simply enters: “sudo trimforce enable” into the Terminal window to enable TRIM. As mentioned in the Ars Technica article, entering the command does prompt a “scary” message to be displayed. They note that the scary warnings about trimforce are likely in place “because not every disk implements TRIM in the same way, and older SSDs might behave oddly or in ways that OS X doesn’t expect when told to TRIM pages. If you have a relatively recent SSD, though, there shouldn’t be any problem enabling TRIM via trimforce."
We can say that we enabled TRIM on our early-2011 MacBook Pro with a Seagate ST480HM000 SSD that we purchased in December 2013, and it seems to be working perfectly. Of course, your mileage may vary, and MacTrast is NOT liable for any damage or data loss that may occur on your Mac.
(Via MacRumors)
