Core Storage is a volume manager, it is between the drive and the partitions. It's mainly used for providing full disk encryption in addition to supporting fusion drive. Here's what Apple wrote in their OS PDFs:
In addition, there are signs from the installer logs when installing Yosemite that Apple is tagging legacy next to HFS+. It is likely CoreStorage will allow Apple to effortlessly covert HFS+ partitions to the newer file system later.
That would make sense, but wouldn't that also require drives with enough free space, to move the written data to free blocks and back again, to change the structure? Unless of course it could utilise RAM, but that would be very prone to errors. Or am I mistaken as to how the procedure might be done?
Doesn't matter as even that workaround isn't reliable. Every window expanded that way increases size in a WEIRD non predictable way.
THIS, is how windows should expand when clicking the green button:
As noted in a quote further down, you've just misunderstood how the button works. In fact, the behaviour of the zoom button is one of my favourite features of OS X. I hate how Windows maximises windows, because it doesn't allow for easily working with more windows. This is why they needed that snap thing and I never felt it was missing on OS X. Clicking zoom let's me see as much content as my screen allows, without stretching or using redundant screen space that could've been used better for other apps.
Yeah, that's always been one of the very few problems I've had with Mac OS X vs Windows. In Windows, the window resizing is actually predictable, but I have never in my 12 years of using Mac OS X known exactly how the green button worked.
See above and below.
Either way, the benefits of TRIM on OS X are largely placebo)
What do you base this on? From a technical standpoint, I see no reason for this to be true. If the drive doesn't know which blocks are free, how can it effectively manage them?
The maker of this video and probably many others didn't actually notice the true function of the little green + button. It is an easy mistake to assume that it is a maximise button when you come from Windows, however as shown in the video, different behaviours occurred depending on the situation. For example, when he opened safari new, and was in the favourite sites view, his safari window didn't resize, but it did when he went onto a website that expanded further down the screen. It didn't go wider though. The reason for this? Because the website wasn't designed to be displayed wider than it was already shown - it doesn't require horizontal scrolling. When the page requires horizontal scrolling because it doesn't fit into the current window size, that is when the window would also widen.
It was Apple's way of making workspaces efficient for multitasking and having windows the required size side by side with one-another.
This is all a little moot now anyway since the green button behaviour was changed to full screen since 10.10. There is however another truly reliable application you can use for maximising windows in 10.10 and below - it's called BetterTouchTool. Requires a small donation but it is the best I have ever seen - adds snapping like what you get in Windows 7+. Reason I say 10.10 and below is because of course in true Apple style they are adding this old feature finally in El Capitan
But you can get the green button behaviour by either double clicking the title bar (if not set to minimise) or option clicking it. (and can't you make it zoom by default in System Preferences? I'm too lazy to check, but I think you can. Regardless, it's not gone. Other than that, I just quoted you for reference.
It seams to me that for those of us looking to update to a new ssd (after 10.11 release) will need to choose ssd devices that the manufacturers support updates via OS X. Does anyone know what brands do currently? (Other than OWC that says they do not need trim.)
Do you mean Firmware updates? Why would that be more of a need now than before? Anyway, yes. Most manufacturers do actually. Most however don't have tools that make firmware updates easy. Samsung for instance has easy firmware updates through Black Magic on Windows, but require booting into their own special bootable software for firmware updates. This can be done by copying a disk image to a USB or something, and booting from it. Alternatively you can update firmware through Windows. It'll work the same when you plug it back into OS X, and you won't have to do it very often. Firmware rarely gets updated.