TRIM questions

[azfar]

I am looking for an external SSD / 40Gpbs Enclosure primarily to use with macos but after researching a lot I am still confused about the current status of TRIM.

1) If macos (Sequoia) does not support TRIM over USB then how does Samsung (T series) or other brands external SSDs support this since they are only USB NVMe drives and not actual Thunderbolt? correct me if I am wrong.

2) Upon checking many SSD enclosures I noticed that they all (Orico, Sabrent, Startech, Ugreen etc) mention Thundrbolt4 (40Gbps) but in reality they are all only USB NVMe so how TRIM will passthrough with those enclosures?

3) Do I must need to use APFS on external drive to avail Trim with macos?

4) Is TRIM still a must required with Modern SSDs like Crucial P3, BX500 etc

5) How fast trim works? if I am deleting large no of files (tens of GBs) and then shutting down mac after few minutes?

6) Any personal experience with any enclosure or external ssd which showing and supporting Trim on mac?

7) Do i need to enable trim by trimforce for external drives?

8) What if manufacturer does provide software for macos?

Looking forward to see some first hand information and experience.

 

[Basic75]

1) This is a complicated subject, especially since Apple removed the possibility to easily check the status of TRIM on external drives. My understanding is that TRIM works on true Thunderbolt drives, and it might work on USB drives that support UASP.

3) On an SSD you should definitely use APFS. Not sure whether other filesystems on a Mac support TRIM.

4) TRIM is very useful on all SSDs. The garbage collector in the SSD needs to know which data is garbage that can be "collected". Otherwise it will waste time, energy and write endurance copying the garbage around for wear levelling. TRIM is one of two ways how the drive knows what the garbage is. (The other is when a block is overwritten, then the old version of that block becomes garbage.)

5) I believe it is very fast. It's just a metadata update in the SSD. A few minutes should be more than enough.

7) AFAIK yes.