If you have a third party SSD you probably noticed that Mac OS X Lion probably doesn’t support TRIM on the drive. While OS X Lion supports TRIM for all Apple SSD’s, many third party SSD’s are left without trim in OS X 10.7, OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9, and OS X 10.10.



Fortunately with a free tool called TRIM Enabler, TRIM support can be added to all SSD’s running Mac OS X 10.7.2 and 10.6.8 or later. The newest version of the utility works by patching a kernel extension, and also includes some SMART data to check the health of the SSD drive.

Download TRIMEnabler now from the developer Cindori

Enabling TRIM on a third party SSD is made very easy with this utility, launch the app and flick the switch to “ON” and enter your administrator password to patch the SSD driver to include support for TRIM. Disabling TRIM is just a matter of flicking the switch off.

Note: Remembering that this is unsupported by Apple, it’d be wise to backup your Mac drive before proceeding (do a quick manual backup with Time Machine) to protect yourself in the event something goes wrong.

While on the topic of the older version of TRIM Enabler, the developer cautions that if you patched Lion with a previous version (1.1 or 1.2) then you should do the following:

If you have patched in Lion with previous Trim Enabler (1.1 or 1.2, not the 2.0 Beta 1) then I suggest you proceed with following steps to update your driver to the latest version: Type in terminal: diskutil mount ‘Recovery HD’ Open Recovery HD in Finder Navigate to BaseSystem.dmg (it is hidden, so you will need to set Finder to show hidden files), open/mount it Open BaseSystem in Finder, navigate to System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext Use Kexthelper app to install that kext back to your system Use Trim Enabler 2.0 (Slider button and status text does not update properly on patch/unpatch, that is why there is a Update button, press it 3 seconds after you have activated or deactivated the switch to properly update status)

We’ve discussed TRIM Enabler before for OS X 10.6.7, but now that it has been updated to support OS X 10.6.8 and OS X 10.7.2 it’s well worth mentioning again, particularly if you don’t have a Lion supported Apple SSD.

Do you use TRIM Enabler with Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks? How does it work for you? Let us know in the comments.