Rookie question about TRIM

[jamesryanbell]

I applied the TRIM-enabling patch from the thread in the Mac Pro section of this forum. I had a ton of free space (like 90GB), but just wanted to run it anyway to see how it ran, etc. It seems to have locked up disk utility because it says that I have no remaining HD space left. It just stays on "creating temporary file", and iStat tells me the drive is completely full. Can you not run TRIM unless the disk is filled to a certain level or something? I haven't run the terminal commands as suggested in the thread because it hasn't finished yet. iStat shows my processor running at about 45%, but there's no free space (I guess due to temporary files created). It's just sitting there seemingly indefinitely.

Did I screw something up? Is this normal?

Thought would be appreciated.

 

[jamesryanbell]

Finally started working again. Took longer than I expected, but I guess I didn't have anything to compare it to.

Entered the terminal commands, and they worked after a few warnings.

Gonna try to reboot and benchmark speeds just for fun.

 

[KPOM]

Make sure you run the TRIM Enabler again after completing the erase free space operation. Otherwise, you'll notice that reboots take longer (because the "erase" free space actually writes a lot of zeroes to the disk). Running the TRIM enabler again runs a terminal command to update the partition table and clear things out.

Since you had a lot of free space, I'm guessing you won't see much, if any difference in benchmarks or speed since you probably didn't have a lot of "garbage" on your drive to begin with. That said, after going through all 3 steps (TRIM Enabler, erase free space, TRIM enabler), I noticed my reboot time was back down to 12-13 seconds. It had been a little slower after I filled up my drive (I am down to about 19GB free on my Mac partition).

The real benefit is that TRIM will help your drive maintain performance. Otherwise, you'd have noticed that over time the drive would get a little bit slower. The newer drives Apple uses are much better than the drives they used in 2008 (my Rev B drive slowed down quite a bit over time), but without TRIM there would still be some performance hit.

 

[jamesryanbell]

Why do I need to "enable" TRIM again though? I know it's a rookie question, but if it's already enabled, what is it actually doing if I enable it again?

EDIT: Oh, you told me. Nevermind. I need to read slower. lol

 

[mexxdude]

I have the same issue. I got a warning saying HD has no more space and it just hanged for about 5 mins or so. I ended out quitting the disk utility via activity monitor. So I guess I should run it again, ignore the warning, and it should eventually complete the erase?

 

[KPOM]

I have the same issue. I got a warning saying HD has no more space and it just hanged for about 5 mins or so. I ended out quitting the disk utility via activity monitor. So I guess I should run it again, ignore the warning, and it should eventually complete the erase?

Yes, let it finish, and then re-run the Trim Enabler. After that, your reboots should be back to normal and you shouldn't need to do anything else again. TRIM will just work automatically in the background as you delete files. The reason some of us erased free space was that we had been running drives for a while. Therefore, we may have "garbage" on the drives from previous deletions. Until those flash cells are written over they aren't cleared out or TRIMed.