That command would disable the TRIM command. It’s not at all common practice, and the kind of person who’d use a strip mall repair shop certainly wouldn’t know about it. The drive could have been used as a *destination* for a backup of a *working* SSD. So let’s explore that.
If the internal solid state drive was working, but the computer was not, it would take specialized equipment and skill to remove it. It’s not a “drive,” it’s a bunch of memory chips soldered directly onto a circuit board inside. It would mean desoldering the chips, and…
…we’re already past what a neighborhood repair shop can do. Certainly not for $75. Which leaves one last option: the computer was bootable, the internal drive was working, and The Mac Shop just cloned it onto a My Passport Pro they bought…weeks after they got the computer.
It’s clear by the date that the drive wasn’t Hunter’s. So we’ll proceed from there. They could’ve used Target Disk Mode for this, if the problem with the MacBook was its display, but it was otherwise bootable. Which brings us to price.
Again, the drive wasn’t Hunter’s. So the shop had to buy it. The 2TB My Passport for Mac is $80 today. It was likely more when it came out. Yet Hunter only paid $85 for the repair? No repair shop owner is that dumb. Let’s sum up:
Ext. drive wasn’t Hunter’s, it was bought after the MacBook was dropped off. The internal drive wasn’t corrupted, because you can’t recover from a corrupted NVMe SSD. Which means it was copied to a drive that costs more than the cost of the service, and no repair shop does that.
Let’s set aside the external drive that the Mac shop bought for the express purpose of copying data that can’t be recovered from a corrupted drive and isn’t the server that the quote specified. Let’s focus on a “water damaged” MacBook Pro, as alleged in the NY Post piece.
How would you know (as a consumer) if it’s water damaged? Does the keyboard not work? The screen? Due to the internals of a MacBook Pro, if they don’t work because of water damage, it’s likely that the drive can’t be accessed either; i.e. it won’t boot.
Which puts us back to “no recovery” because of the kind of solid state storage in the MacBook Pro. The only conclusion left: the computer was working fine, data was copied (by *someone*) to an external drive bought at retail, and once there, the data is easily changed/forged.
Hell, the emails were “printed” to PDF in October 2019, according to metadata in the PDF files linked by the NY Post story. Six months after the computer was allegedly dropped off by someone who may or may not be Hunter Biden.
Basically, there isn’t one part of their story that holds even a small amount of water. You know what does “fit” the narrative, though? Some sketchy dude overcharged his customer (whom he didn’t recognize at first) for “recovery” (making a backup of a working drive)
The responses to the thread from that point make it incoherent, but what seems to be true is this. According to the manufacturer of the hard drive that the Post claims contains all that damaging information, it was one that was manufactured 6 days after the laptop was supposedly dropped off.