Keeping the 4GB PAIR just might be almost as fast or faster, (it's to do with interleaving), especially if you're adding/replacing the HDD with a SSD.Īnd that 2011 hard drive is getting towards the end of its normal life and may be slowing down as well.Ĭlick to expand.Hi MSue - responded to your cross-post and welcomed you to the forum. Oppps… I forgot, your iMac can only use Maximum 6GB RAM. Probably a lot of apps like AppleWorks you might use or need won't run with later OS X versions. PPS: I'd suggest you keep your Snow Leopard on it's own partition if and when you do upgrade. But El Cap'n does tend to handle memory better than Snow Leopard does.
You can wait until after you upgrade to see if more RAM is required, but 8GB would be my minimum recommendation. But there are a few outliers, and Apple doesn’t want to be responsible if your SSD’s hardware doesn’t implement TRIM properly and you run into problems.You may not have much or even any choice as to your OS X Update, defending on what you've done in the past and what you have available.ĤGB of RAM is pretty minimal and the El Capt'n is the last OS X version that Mac can run:Īpple iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 20-Inch (Early 2008) Specs Realistically, this should work properly with most SSDs on a Mac, just as enabling TRIM works properly for most SSDs on Linux. If you want to disable trimforce and only use TRIM for Apple’s OEM solid-state drives, open a Terminal window again and run the following command: After it reboots, TRIM will be enabled for all SSDs connected to your Mac. Your Mac will immediately reboot after you agree to the second question with a After you do, you’ll need to read a scary-sounding warning and agree by typing a Type the following command into the terminal window and press Enter:Įnter your user account’s password at the prompt. To run trimforce, open a Terminal window (press Command + Space, type Terminal, and press Enter to launch a terminal via There’s no way to enable TRIM for one SSD and leave it disabled for another. After you run it, TRIM will be enabled for all your solid-state drives. It disables the check that only allows TRIM to work with Apple-provided OEM solid-state drives. This command activates TRIM for every single SSD on your Mac. This utility is also included in OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
You may want to do some research and see what other Mac users have experienced when enabling TRIM with your SSD before continuing.Īpple quietly added a new command named “trimforce” in a minor update to OS X 10.10 Yosemite - OS X 10.10.4. Mac users have used third-party TRIM-enabling utilities for years with a variety of SSDs.
You probably shouldn’t activate trimforce if you have one of the SSDs that appears on this blacklist in your Mac.īeyond that, most drives seem to work properly with TRIM on Mac OS X. There have also been reports of some Crucial drives not functioning properly with TRIM on Linux.Ī blacklist of SSDs that don’t support TRIM properly With certain Samsung SSDs with TRIM on Linux, and similar issues may occur if you enabled TRIM for such drives on a Mac. Apple doesn’t want to be responsible for any issues, which is why OS X hides this functionality behind a command and a scary warning message.Įvery solid-state drive implements TRIM in a slightly different way, and many SSD manufacturers only truly test for compatibility on Windows. Whether this is safe to do depends on the SSD you’re using in your Mac. Starting with OS X 10.10.4, Apple now provides an official - but unsupported - way of enabling TRIM for any SSD. It was now necessary to disable the kext signing security mechanism to enable TRIM for these drives, reducing a Mac’s security. As TRIM-enabling utilities worked at this low level, this locked them out.
This checks that all the drivers on a Mac are either unaltered or approved by Apple. In OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple introduced “kext signing” - Kernel extension signing. Users who installed their own SSDs had to hunt down third-party tools that enabled TRIM in an unsupported way.
Historically, Mac OS X has only enabled TRIM for the solid-state drives Apple provides. Windows 7 and newer have had built-in support for TRIM, which they enable for all SSDs. The SSD can then manage its available storage more intelligently. TRIM ensures the physical NAND memory locations containing deleted files are erased before you need to write to them. With flash memory, it’s faster to write to empty memory - to write to full memory, the memory must first be erased and then written to. The SSD knows that the file is deleted and it can erase the file’s data from its flash storage. When an operating system uses TRIM with a solid-state drive, it sends a signal to the SSD every time you delete a file. Why Solid-State Drives Slow Down As You Fill Them Up Why TRIM is Important, and Why Macs Don’t Always Enable It by Default