The SandForce controller in our SSDs takes care of this “garbage collection” as well as performs various other tasks that keep your drive running at optimal speed, without the drop-off that you see with other brands. If you have an OWC SSD, though, you don’t need TRIM. There have been murmurings of a utility in Lion that will support all SSDs officially, and there have been several hacks to try and enable TRIM for all SSDs. As of right now, there is some basic TRIM support for Apple-branded SSDs in the OS, but third-party vendors are largely left out of the deal. With OS X Lion right around the corner, there’s been a lot of talk about its potential TRIM support.

This allows for better performance for many SSDs. As solid state drives became more affordable, the TRIM command was introduced to facilitate “garbage collection” of deleted data, allowing the SSD to reset those “unused” blocks back to an “empty” state. When you simply “delete” a file on a traditional hard drive, it’s not really “erased.” Instead, its location on the drive is reported to the OS as “empty, even though the ones and zeroes are still there, ready to be overwritten. On SSDs, however, overwriting data can take a considerably longer time than writing to “unused” space.

Before we get started talking about TRIM and why you should or should not enable it, let’s just grab a little background, so everybody is roughly on the same page.

Trim enabler 10.6.8 download