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I’m using various SSDs on a mid-2014 MacBook Pro 15-inch Retina having changed the Mac SSD for a higher size with adapter board all working fine with Trim enabled. I use external SSDs on both USB 3 enclosures and on Thunderbolt 2 enclosures. The Thunderbolt Lacie Rugged and LBD enclosures show that I have enabled Trim Force and are working but is it possible that Trim can be enabled on USB in any workaround? With modern SSDs i.e. Crucial BX MX and NVMe do they have their own built-in garbage collection/Trim that works in the background?
I’m trying to find an adapter for NVMe (I believe to SATA) so that I can put them in one of the Thunderbolt external enclosures I have; I find the complication of type confusing. Many thanks for any help and very happy I’ve found this site.
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asked Sep 5 at 9:09
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Even without Trim support, a SSD Modern SDD maximum write time is still faster than transfer time through the USB 3 interface. Therefore, there would be no advantage to having Trim support. Here the limiting factor is the 5 Gb/s USB 3.0 ports.
If you find an adapter for NVMe to SATA so that you can put a NVMe SDD drive in one of the Thunderbolt external enclosures, then the limiting factor would be the 6 Gb/s SATA 3 interface.
answered Sep 5 at 10:54
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Regular USB 3.0 enclosure won’t do it. What you need is enclosure with UASP support or factory-made external SSD with UASP support (like Samsung T5 & T7). Unfortunately as far as my experience goes not every UASP USB 3.0 enclosure is processed correctly by the OS (i.e. my Age Star USB 3.0 3UBCP3 is UASP-capable according to documentation but TRIM by macOS or Windows doesn’t work out of the box). However if OS won’t provide necessary TRIM automation you can use third-party tool to force send TRIM command to external SSD, i.e. in Windows you can use O&O Defrag 15+ CLI command /TRIM for NTFS, exFAT, FAT32 file systems on external SSDs (IIRC even non-UASP-ready!), that’s what I do with my external SSDs formatted to exFAT. Another specific moment is file system of your external SSD, i.e. it looks like for APFS the minimum requirement is macOS Monterey.
answered Sep 5 at 23:00
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