Tim, You didn’t say what size or how full the SSD was.
The second item is very important. If you get the free space in the SSD to < 10 - 15 % of the SSD capacity you are going to experience symptoms similar to what you have described. There are plenty of articles like this around to give you further guidance if required. [1]https://ssdbuddy.com/how-much-free-space-should-you-leave-on-your-ss d/ regards, Robin On 14 Jun 2026, at 7:40 am, Tim Law via WAMUG <[email protected]> wrote: Good morning I've had a frustrating few weeks with my 2017 iMac — 40Gb RAM maxing out, needing to force-quit apps, and then occasional crashes every few weeks. With help from Claude (Anthropic's AI), it turned out the culprit was a single missing setting. When you install a third-party SSD in a Mac, which I did many years ago, Apple doesn't automatically enable TRIM — the process that keeps the drive running efficiently. Without it, the drive slowly gets bogged down, causes memory problems as macOS tries to compensate, and can eventually trigger crashes. The fix was one Terminal command: sudo trimforce enable If anyone in the group has upgraded their Mac's storage with a non-Apple SSD and hasn't checked this, it's well worth a look. To check go to the Apple menu, System Settings, About. Then down the bottom is System Report. Check under Hardware: SATA: TRIM Support: was NO, and is now YES after I ran sudo trimforce enable Several warnings come up, which I clicked Y to A restart and I will see how things go. Regards Tim -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <https://lists.wamug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/wamug> References 1. https://ssdbuddy.com/how-much-free-space-should-you-leave-on-your-ssd/
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