Macworld said it is not a serious problem but suggested doubling the base RAM and SSD as insurance.
Let me defer to a 2014 article on this subject (https://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-check-and-enable-trim-on-a-mac-ssd--mac-60738):
You may have noticed that even though you buy SSDs of a certain capacity, you have much less space actually available to use. A typical 256GB SSD will have only about 240GB available for use, for instance.
The reason is that SSD manufacturers set aside a percentage of the drive’s space for the firmware to use as a buffer for Garbage Collection and other maintenance tasks. This is called Over-Provisioning and it’s necessary for making sure that the drive’s performance doesn’t degrade significantly as it fills up.
As a general rule, the more free space there is on an SSD, the better it will perform.
It makes sense to me not to let the free space on an SSD get below 20% for a variety of reasons. Even accessing a spinning drive slows down a lot when the free space gets below 10GB. The drive is used for more than just storing your files. There is a a need for temporary cache, log files come and go, Time Machine needs space to store temporary backups of incremental changes made to anything, there is definitely a requirement for a dedicated swap space, and there is a need for a minimum amount of 20GB for any major OS upgrade. So yes, having a lot of free storage space is very important, and I think that less than 100GB of free space for any size SSD is pushing it.
Keep in mind that the SSD lifetime is marked by read/write cycles, not by how much you put on it or how long it is used.
How storage is accessed on an SSD is very different than how it is done on a spinning drive. Once you write on a cell, you can’t just write over it with new data, so deleting a file leaves a “hole” that can’t be written to until TRIM does its thing (see my NOTE below). This is also called garbage collection. TRIM periodically goes through the entire storage area reorganizing the entire block where there is a hole. This process uses read/write activity, which ultimately reduces the number of read/write cycles left. Finally, TRIM only works when the computer is idle, and that’s another reason to not turn off the computer when you’re not using it. Let the display go to sleep, but not the computer.
What the news isn’t talking about is how long you can leave your computer turned off before an SSD starts losing its data. In order to keep the data on the SSD, it needs power to refresh the state of every active cell (this is not a read/write cycle). Without refreshing, an active cell just might revert back to its steady state value.
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-what-trim-ssds-why-it-useful/
My recommended settings for Energy Saver:
If you have external hard drives attached, allowing them to sleep reduces energy consumption, but it also means you have to wait for it to spin up before you can access it. So that’s a choice for the user. But not letting the computer go to sleep should not be an option.
Rebooting a computer probably needs to be done once a week.
Turning off a computer probably only needs to be done when you know you’re not going to be using it for more than a day.
A computer with an SSD placed in storage for months might not mean it will still have all files intact the next time you turn it on.
NOTE: TRIM used to be an application that had to be enabled in an OS if an SSD was installed. Most new SSD’s today have TRIM built in to the device making it unnecessary to enable TRIM in the OS. All SSD’s made by Crucial have TRIM built in. It would not be wise to enable the OS copy of TRIM if the SSD has TRIM built in.
I have not seen a case where TRIM is required to be installed and enabled on any Mac computer since as far back as 2014.
When I swap out a hard drive with an SSD or add an external SSD, I only use Crucial drives. Other vendors, such as Samsung and OWC, are known to have TRIM in the SSD. It may now be the case for all vendors, but I have not confirmed it.
One myth about preserving or “restoring” an SSD is to reformat it now and then. DON’T! This only subtracts from the available read/write cycles. If you need to “recycle” or repurpose an SSD, just delete what is on it. TRIM will take care of “wiping” the disk. Since there is no magnetic “residue” on an SSD like there is on a spinning drive, there is no chance of recovering “lost” data in an SSD once TRIM has done its job.
John R Carter Sr