Question about TRIM and SSD

[yadmonkey]

My buddy let his Crucial SSD fill up almost completely. I got him to free up 60GB and I'm wondering what if anything we should do condition the free space. TRIM was not formerly enabled. Would it be enough to enable it now? Anything else we should do? Thanks!

 

[maflynn]

Sure, it can help, but your friend needs to clean up his drive.

I like OmniDiskSweeper. It will provide a sorted list of what's consuming your space.

If you run it with sudo (As shown below), it will include some system files that it woud not normally have access to scan. That is a more accurate representation of what's consuming your drive.

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Another option is to use this terminal command
sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

I prefer to redirect it to a text file (this puts it in your Documents folder
sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g / > ~/Documents/du.txt

Like the sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper command, it will scan all directories, but produce a text file as opposed to showing the results in a window

I would highly recommend that your friend first ensure he has a current backup before doing any deletes, all too often we here about people cleaning up their drive and being a bit overzealous and removing stuff they regret.

 

[JTToft]

Your friend should also manually TRIM the drive. First enable TRIM and then boot to Single User Mode to run this command:

fsck -fy

 

[idunn]

I've run a self-installed SSD for years, without TRIM, and never noticed a problem. This is in often near maxing out available space before removing some files.

This is not to suggest that using TRIM may not be beneficial. Only if not wishing to mess with it, my experience to date.

 

[Donka]

Use caffeine or similar to keep the mac awake for a couple of hours but don't do anything with it. With the drive being idle, its built in garbage collection should kick in and free up the recently deleted space which TRIM would have no effect on.
What capacity of drive is it? Freeing up a little more space would also be beneficial.