Samsung T5 External SSD - Is TRIM supported on Mac OS Sierra?

[jjacobi]

In Windows, you can issue TRIM commands manually using the optimize command. And after extensive large writes and erasures during which the drive has had no time to clean things up, it will indeed set off house-cleaning.

The timing of this is of course, as you say, at the discretion of the vendor. All that I know of are very proactive, and the more there is to do, the quicker they get at it. As to the reboot, I was told by multiple vendors that power up is when they can expect a lot of down time (in computer terms) in which to perform housekeeping.

And while all the TRIM command does is tell the drive that data is safe for removal, the entire purpose of telling the drive is so it can free up and optimize its storage. If I remember correctly, it was the remedy for early erase before write issues.

 

[motrek]

In Windows, you can issue TRIM commands manually using the optimize command. And after extensive large writes and erasures during which the drive has had no time to clean things up, it will indeed set off house-cleaning.
...

Assuming the operating system isn't full of bugs, it will issue the appropriate TRIM commands every time a file is deleted. So at any given point in time, all the appropriate blocks should already be marked as empty.

So if you're using a Windows program to issue TRIM commands manually, it should do literally nothing. I mean, what's the point of issuing the TRIM command to the same blocks twice?

The only time I can think of when this command might do anything useful is if the drive was previously in some kind of situation where TRIM commands weren't being issued (maybe you had it in an external enclosure?), so there might be data on the drive that was deleted but not marked for erasure.

I think any improvement you might see from running this Windows utility might be largely imagined.

Also, I question the idea that a drive is going to see a lot of downtime during boot. That will actually be one of the busiest times for a drive, no? If you want a drive to do housekeeping, maybe just leave your computer on (and idle) during a lunch break.