The best way to expand your Mac’s lifespan and obtain a significant speed boost is by replacing the hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). You’ll notice the huge performance improvement right from the first time you boot up and immediately praise yourself for making this investment. However, you shouldn’t stop at installing a new SSD. There is one tiny command line you must type into Terminal to enable a feature meant to expand the lifespan of the newly installed drive; this feature is called TRIM.

Mac SSD support. SSD buying guide. Crucial Storage Executive. Limited SSD warranty. 2.5-inch installation guide. PCIe M.2 installation guide. Easy SSD install guide. Mac Install Guides. IMac Intel 17' iMac Intel 20' EMC 2105 and 2118. IMac Intel 20' EMC 2133 and 2210. IMac Intel 20' EMC 2266. For whatever reason, Apple hasn’t allowed you to enable TRIM (one of the best ways to maximize the life of your solid state drive) on third-part SSD drives. Now, you finally can, no third-party.

What Is TRIM, and Why Do You Need It?

Writing to an SSD is totally different than writing to a traditional hard drive: the SSD first clears existing information from the flash memory cells and programs new data into them; hence, the writing process is often referred as program/erase cycles or P/E cycles. There is one thing to note, though, and that is that there are a limited number of P/E cycles an SSD can support. Writing to an SSD is like writing on a piece of paper with a pencil: if you erase the same space too many times, it can wear out. Manufacturers address this issue with so-called wear leveling, which prevents SSD memory cells (the pages) from wearing out.

SSDs contain memory cells organized into pages and blocks. What represents a challenge is that with an SSD you can write on a page any time, but you can erase only one block at a time. Each block contains a specified number of pages (from 32 to 256), which contain a specified amount of data (2 to 8KB). Unlike traditional hard drives, data on SSDs can’t be directly overwritten. When data changes, it must be written again. The same data (and metadata) ends up being written over and over again in our daily use of computers generating a phenomenon called write amplification, which uses up the limited P/E cycles.

Download CleanMyMac X from MacPaw’s website and clean up to 500MB of junk data from your computer while enjoying all the features of the software without major limitations.

TRIM can be considered a more efficient way of handling “garbage” and was introduced shortly after SSDs became available. The TRIM command allows the operating system to inform the SSD about regions where the data marked for deletion are stored, and after trimming the SSD won’t preserve the contents of the block when it writes new data to a page. This enables less write amplification and, as it doesn’t use up the precious P/E cycles, the SSD’s lifespan will be much longer.

Back Up Your Mac Before Enabling the TRIM Command

You need to enable trimming manually when installing a third party SSD. All Macs shipped with an SSD have TRIM enabled, however, and yours can be checked by clicking on the Apple logo > About This Mac > System Report > SATA/SATA Express and look for “Trim Support”. Note that this won’t work on Retina MacBook Pro (late 2016) units.

If the answer here is “no” and you are running either macOS El Capitan 10.11.x or macOS Yosemite 10.10.4 or later versions, then TRIM can be enabled with one simple command in Terminal. Earlier versions of macOS don’t support this command, but there are third party apps, such as TRIM Enabler ($14.99), that can enable it.

Before you enable TRIM on the freshly installed SSD, we highly recommend doing a manual backup with Time Machine (or the backup service of your preference). Do not skip this step, because – despite supporting it – Apple doesn’t take any responsibility for data loss during the process. If anything goes wrong, the data will be lost and you won’t be able to recover it, so a backup can save the day.

But you don’t want to fill up your backup drive or the precious space on the SSD with all the junk files generated by apps as you use them: cookies, cache files, duplicates, erroneous downloads, iOS firmware downloads and much more should be wiped. For this reason, we strongly recommend performing a system cleanup using a Mac optimization app such as CleanMyMac, MacBooster or OnyX. After the cleaning process your Mac will be in its best shape for a backup and then to enable TRIM.

Ssd Trim Mac Os

How to Enable TRIM on macOS in Five Easy Steps

To expand the lifespan of your SSD, follow the steps below:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. Type the command sudo trimforce enable, and press enter.
3. Type the admin password, and press enter.
4. Read the system notice, type “y”, and press enter.
5. macOS will require your consent to reboot after finishing the process, so type “y” again, and press enter.

After finishing the process your Mac will reboot with TRIM enabled. Check again if TRIM support is now “OK” by clicking on the Apple logo > About this Mac > System Report > SATA/SATA Express, or by typing the following command in terminal:

system_profiler SPSerialATADataType | grep ‘TRIM’.

Best Mac Optimization Software of 2020

Get the Best Deals on Mac Optimization Software

Stay up to date on the latest tech news and discounts on Mac optimization software with our monthly newsletter.

The TRIM command organizes data on an SSD and improves its performance. However, due to the nature of TRIM, data recovery efforts are less likely to be successful. Learn how to check if your SSD is TRIM enabled and about TRIM-SSD data recovery efforts.

It's quite easy to perform Trim SSD data recovery now. Only two phrases - 1. Check Trim Status; 2. Perform SSD recovery. Follow and get your SSD data back now:

Can You Recover Data from an SSD with TRIM Enabled

'Hi, just now I inadvertently deleted the wrong folder on my 2014 MacBook Pro running Yosemite, and then emptied the trash bin. I don't have a backup of this folder, so I'm feeling quite helpless. The worst part is that my SSD drive is TRIM-enabled by default. Is there any way for me to recover these files?'

Well, before giving you the answer, it’s important to first understand what the TRIM command is. TRIM command, also known solely as TRIM, allows an operating system to inform a Solid State Drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer in use so that they can be wiped to make room for new data.

Normally, when data is deleted from a hard drive, the data is not accessible but it remains on the physical drive. Only once the space needs to be used for other information will the data block be wiped, then rewritten. Via TRIM, the data block is wiped immediately upon deletion. In this way, when the system tries to write new data onto a previously used block, it can do so without waiting. This results in improved performance.

Trimforce Mac

The cost of this improvement in speed is that, on a TRIM-enabled SSD, deleted files can not be recovered. Once you empty the Windows Recycle Bin or Mac Trash Bin, the files are permanently gone.

Check TRIM Status

To see whether TRIM is enabled on your SSD or not, follow these instructions.

On PC: Go to Command Prompt and enter fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If DisableDeleteNotify = 0, trim is enabled.

If DisableDeleteNotify = 1, trim is disabled.

On Mac:

Click the Apple logo in the top-left of the screen and go to About This Mac.

Click System Report…

Go to Hardware then SATA/SATA Express, and look for TRIM Support.

TRIM Support: Yes = TRIM is enabled.

SSD TRIM Data Recovery

Although it is definitively impossible to recover data from a TRIM-enabled SSD, you can still attempt to recover using EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free (for PC or for Mac). It is often the case that the file names will appear in the software’s scan results, but the file content will not be recoverable. You can try to recover a few files with the free version to see if your data has indeed been wiped or not, at no cost.

The ultimate way to safeguard your files is to regularly back up your data. With TRIM enabled, this practice is incredibly important. EaseUS Todo Backup is a data backup utility that will allow you to restore all files that are lost or inadvertently deleted. Through the program, you can automate backup tasks to run on a time or event basis; such as backing up to an external hard drive each time it is plugged in. I’ll stress again that maintaining data backups is crucial, particularly for TRIM-enabled devices. EaseUS Todo Backup Free (for PC or for Mac) is fully functional and can provide you with all necessary back up features.