Clarification about 10.11 and trimforce

[kiwidesign]

Hello there! As I wrote in another thread, I recently performed a clean install of 10.11.2 on my 2011 MBP, coming from a 10.8.x installation... quite the upgrade!

For the occasion I also switched my internal drive from the original spinning drive to a brand new 512gb Crucial MX100 I had lying around.

Since I never went through Yosemite, I read about the problems with TRIM and locking down the OS, but never really got down to the details...

TL;DR I'd just like to know if 1) it's completely safe to enable TRIM via sudo trimforce enable and 2) would anything happen if I were to zap the PRAM as I occasionally do for "maintenance"?

Thanks!

 

[KALLT]

(1) Yes*, (2) no.

*99.9% safe.

 

[kiwidesign]

(1) Yes*, (2) no.

*99.9% safe.

Perfect, thanks a lot

 

[Ebenezum]

I wonder why Apple shows the warning about TRIM in Terminal when using trimforce command? Is it just a way to avoid any responsibility for potential problems or is something else?

I could be wrong but I suspect there are couple of potential issues:

1. Mistakenly deleted information is harder to recover because garbage collection works more efficiently and file might be permanently deleted before it can be recovered.
2. If SSD controller has bugs in its TRIM implementation results could be nasty.

In any case I recommend making a backup before using TRIM just in case...

 

[Nermal]

2. If SSD controller has bugs in its TRIM implementation results could be nasty.

Bingo. Apparently there were issues with some older drives, but I haven't heard of problems with modern ones.

 

[KALLT]

I wonder why Apple shows the warning about TRIM in Terminal when using trimforce command? Is it just a way to avoid any responsibility for potential problems or is something else?

The former. They don’t control the hardware and they certainly don’t want to open this can of worms in case something does go wrong. Moreover, this feature is not documented anywhere on their website and has no manual page either (if I remember correctly). This is a fan service for users who rather disabled system protections, TRIM support being a big reason for doing it, but they don’t advertise it.