Enable TRIM in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for Speed and Longer SSD Life

Lifehacker’s Whitson Gordon has an easy to follow how-to guide on “[Enablng] TRIM on Your Macs Solid-State Drive .” TRIM is a feature on many SSDs (solid state drives) that prolongs their service life while increasing performance.

I followed the guide for my 120 GB Intel SSD (model INTEL SSDSA2M120G2GC), and I immediately saw my MacBook 5,1 system boot time decrease from about a minute to approximately 30 seconds. In case there were any problems, I did backup my Mac OS settings (Groth’s program has a backup button that you can’t miss) before applying the patch.

The important thing to consider is that this only works on SSDs that support TRIM, and if you do successfully apply this to your system, you should run the cache cleaning commands in the article.

If things do not work correctly for you, don’t forget that you can boot into Safe Mode (hold down Shift while booting), rerun Oskar Groth’s Trim Enabler for Mac, restore your old, non-TRIM settings, and reboot normally.

Happy TRIMming!

Published by Jason W. Ellis

I am an Associate Professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY whose teaching includes composition and technical communication, and research focuses on science fiction, neuroscience, and digital technology. Also, I coordinate the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, which holds more than 600 linear feet of magazines, anthologies, novels, and research publications.