Given that Thunderbolt SSDs are unusual and expensive, should you buy a USB4 model that claims to be compatible with Thunderbolt? Watch out for the traps.
TRIM
If you want it to have full TRIM and SMART support, it’ll need to have an NVMe interface and a Thunderbolt connection.
There’s a big difference between the storage that’s available, and what’s advisable. Whether it’s affordable is another question.
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.
A step-by-step account of how Disk Arbitration and APFS mount an external disk, from handling its partitions, to performing trims.
Enabling the TRIM command was once thought important to maintain good write performance on SSDs. What has happened to it? Should we still be enabling it?
Traced from recognition of the cable connection, through establishing PCI streams, to mounting the volume with APFS, and the bonus of a good trim at the end.
How APFS can trim free space in a read/write disk image and transform it into a sparse file, so it uses storage more efficiently.
Should you enable TRIM, and what is it? Do you need to turn wear levelling on, and what about fragmentation on SSDs? Some mysteries explained.
With narrowing of the cost difference between Fusion Drives and full-size SSDs, it’s worth considering likely differences in working life.
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