Should I enable TRIM?

Question

I have a Intel 320 Series 120GB SSD installed in the optibay of my MBP 13" 2012. I’m not sure, if I should enable TRIM via the TRIM Enable from http://www.groths.org/

I did enable it before on my 2011 MBP, but I not sure if I really needed to. I never had problems by enabling it. But I also doesn’t want to tinker with this, when I’m not entirely.

I know what TRIM does. And if you buy a Mac with a SSD from Apple, it is enabled by default.

Maybe I should use TRIM, but use another tool to enabling it. I don’t know.

Answer 1

TRIM and Garbage Collection (GC) are not the same, and are both necessary to maintain performance after the drive has been used for a while. GC only takes place in the background when idle, or when the OS needs to write to a previously used block.

TRIM proactively zeros unused areas in the background. This is why you see a slight performance hit, but on an SSD this is negligible and is a lot faster than waiting for GC to work on demand after you've been using the SSD for a while.

Using the TRIM enabler app is not advised, but you can enable it via the terminal by following these steps.

http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

Answer 2

AFAIK the Intel SSD's have a build-in clean up feature, so if you enable TRIM it 'can' slow you disk down.

Here is an article from OWC: http://blog.macsales.com/11051-to-trim-or-not-to-trim-owc-has-the-answer - which have a simular build-in feature.