Quick: Enabling TRIM support on your Hackintosh

Quick: Enabling TRIM support on your Hackintosh

As you may or may not know, TRIM support is not enabled by default on macOS on any SSD not provided by Apple directly.

This is done because not all manufacturers follow the standards, and often just test for compatibility with Windows. Fortunately though, enabling TRIM support is easy enough, so long as you're ok saying yes to a scary sounding message. My guess is that if you're running a Hackintosh, you're probably used to dealing with scary sounding messages. And, so long as you keep a proper backup, in the worst case scenario of your particular SSD not supporting TRIM properly, you can revert back easily.

Do note though, that it will be good for you to check online first to see if anyone else has used the SSD you have with TRIM enabled. While it can be ok to be a bit brave, if an SSD is known to not support TRIM support (or not well), it's probably best to avoid enabling it.

Check TRIM status

To check what the current status is of TRIM support, head on over to System Report (Apple menu » About This Mac » System Report...) and head for the SATA/SATA Express or NVMExpress section, depending on what kind of drive you have installed. Select your SSD and look through its details until you find TRIM Support.

Note that in this context, "support" does not mean whether or not your drive actually supports it. It simply refers to whether or not macOS currently has TRIM support enabled for this particular drive.

Enable TRIM support

Enabling TRIM support is just one single command. Once run, this will enable TRIM support on all SSD drives installed. From what I can tell you cannot pick and choose which drives you want to enable support for, though you might be able to achieve that if you desire by temporarily unplugging whichever SSD you don't want to enable TRIM support for before running the command. But I have not tested this, so please do let me know if this is even possible if that's something you end up trying.

To enable trim support, simply open up a Terminal, and type in the following command. Make sure you are ready for your machine to immediately want to reboot after this command.

sudo trimforce enable

Reply with y to the question, and hit enter.

That's it.

After your computer has rebooted you can confirm TRIM support is fully enabled by checking System Report again.

Optional: Safe Mode Drive Check

Some recommended you reboot into safe mode after enabling TRIM support, and running a drive health check, as that supposedly honors TRIM support and tells the drive to start doing its thing for previously deleted files right away. If you have been noticing your drive feeling particularly slow these days, you might want to give this a try to see if it helps.