Trim enables an SSD to erase pages of unused memory so they’re ready for reuse. It saves time, and greatly improves write performance. How to the best out of Trim.
System Information
Introduced in 1997, Apple System Profiler gave detailed information about a Mac’s hardware and software. Later came Gestalt, a dictionary of useful info about a Mac.
This has become more complex with increasingly popular hybrid drives that support USB4/Thunderbolt and fall back to USB 3.x.
Where can you look if you can’t find it in System Information? What if you need that value or setting in a script or app? Here are some suggestions.
Why should you trim an SSD? How to tell whether an SSD needs trimming, finding out whether it has trim support, and whether it does trim.
It’s a simple and popular request: how is my Mac’s SSD ageing? How long is it likely to last? But macOS has no tool to offer, and 3rd party tools aren’t really ideal for M1 Macs still.
SilentKnight was producing some results in a mixture of English and Dutch. Its environment settings needed correction. When that didn’t fix it, I looked deeper to find language-unfriendly design in a command tool.
How can you tell whether your Mac’s shiny new Sealed System Volume is properly sealed? You could easily be misled into thinking it isn’t.
Identical code using system_profiler to look up the firmware version number worked in two apps but failed in a third. The solution was obscure.
Trying to get hardware info within an app – simple data like CPU details, logic board ID, type of internal storage – is fraught and undocumented, the victim of prolonged self-neglect.
The Eclectic Light Company 