TRIM support for external SSD bootable drive

"How bad is it to not use TRIM on my drive in your opinion?"

This is a question you will likely get you as many answers

for not doing it as you will get for doing it. The internal

controllers for SSDs has improved a vast amount in terms of

wear leveling, provisioning, and garbage collection. As a matter

of fact, some manufacturers will tell you not to enable TRIM

as it will interfere with these built in processes.

Of course the chip manufacturer themselves and the quality

of their processes will greatly affect matters. Where as there are a

myriad of SSD manufacturers, there are actually only a very small

number who make the chips themselves, Samsung being the largest.

Also, based on current Flash technology, if you wrote to every single

byte of your drive everyday, it is more likely that your computer becomes

obsolete before your SSD has "worn out". Of course, like anything else,

something can fail before then or las well beyond then.

FWIW, using NVMe via USB3 is wasting the capabilities of NVMe

and if you are using USB3, SATA3 drives will max out the capabilities

of USB3. Especially since the 2014 Mini only has a 5Gb/s USB3 Gen 1.

It would have been cheaper and as good of performance to simply

get a USB->SATA3 adapter and plug in a standard SSD into it.

TRIM is not supported on Macs with any USB drive.

Only external drives with a Thunderbolt 1, 2, or 3 interface

support TRIM.