Odd issue with Samsung SSD

[koffiejunkie]

Hey gang,

In late 2015 I decided to take care of my storage needs for the rest of my 2011 MBP's expected life, and purchased a Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SSD. It's got a 10 year warranty, and is good for vastly more writes than I'm likely to ever do. I got the drive, installed it, installed TrimEnabler, turned on Trim, and migrated my stuff. Life was good

About 6 months later, performance was starting to feel sluggish, beach balls were spinning, and not long after that my backups (both Arq and Superduper) started failing with input/output errors. I investigated, researched, and asked knowledgable colleagues. It looked like it was failing to reallocate failed blocks. SMART data showed that it had reallocated a large number, so I don't know if it's exhausted the spare blocks or if it was unable to read the bad block. Whatever, I was told that a factory reset/cell clearing would force the drive to move out the bad blocks and rezone the drive (possibly to a slightly smaller size). OK, did that, it came back the same size, I did a dd write pass which showed no problems. Restored my data, and life was good. For a while.

Trouble started again within a few months. This time I wiped the drive, printed out the SMART data, and took it to the manufacturer. Showed them the SMART drive and they didn't argue - gave me a brand new drive. Life was good. For a while (spot a pattern?)

Now another six or so months later, I'm getting input/output errors again. On the new drive. I should add that this laptop is mostly used for e-mail, occasional web browsing to pay bills, etc (I mostly use my work laptop for heavy browsing), and importing my photos/videos, although I don't really get time to work on them. So light use. The SMART figures confirm this - blocks written on the first drive by the time I took it in, was less than 10% of the warranty (23TB of 300TB). The laptop stays at home on my desk. It's on 24/7 but mostly idle. Before the Samsung I had a OCZ Vertex 2 (SATA2) 480GB, and at the time I was doing heavy photo work - that drive still works (in another box now), so I really don't think it's a usage issue.

So I'm wondering if I just got really unlucky, or if there's some bad mojo between my MBP and the SSD? Either an incompatibility or something being faulty? Anyone seen this?

Thanks

 

[mobber]

Open this link http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-pro-ssd-trim,3538-5.html
2 TB SSD maybe a bridge too far?

 

[ponder]

To get two duds in a row does not compute.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Open this link http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-pro-ssd-trim,3538-5.html

I did have TRIM enabled from the start. Interestingly, reading up on this I discovered that there is now a 'forcetrim' command (from 10.10.5 onwards, I think?) that enables TRIM for any SSD device. Apparently TRIMEnabled patches the signed Apple driver, which isn't such a great idea. So I've uninstalled it and used 'forcetrim' instead.

2 TB SSD maybe a bridge too far?

Heresy! I've been eyeing the 4TB model

To get two duds in a row does not compute.

My thoughts too, especially when not buying the cheapest one I can find. I deliberately spent the extra cash on the 850 Pro because 2TB is a lot of hassle when you have to restore/recover.

 

[bigboy529]

There's something with Mac's and most SSD's not supporting something to do with Mac's, I can't quite recall and don't have time to Google now, all I can remember is that Angelbird SSD's does have this support or file system or whatever. Will come back later when I have time.

 

[koffiejunkie]

There's something with Mac's and most SSD's not supporting something to do with Mac's, I can't quite recall and don't have time to Google now, all I can remember is that Angelbird SSD's does have this support or file system or whatever. Will come back later when I have time.

Are you perhaps thinking of the 2011 MBP issue where the secondary SATA controller is buggy when running in SATA3 mode? It doesn't matter (to Apple) because the optical drive they ship attached to it is SATA2 (or SATA1, I don't remember which). The primary SATA controller doesn't suffer from this problem.

I learned about this issue the hard way - bought a fancy new SSD and optibay to replace the optical drive, and the machine would lock up every time you try to access it. Eventually got old stock of a SATA2 SSD that served me well for several years.

 

[koffiejunkie]

I thought I'd close the loop on this, even though I'm not confident of the cause. In an unrelated incident, I spilled some beverage on my MacBook Air. No permanent damage, it's been working perfectly fine for months since, but the keys are awful sticky. I decided I wanted to sell it, so I made an appointment at the apple store to have it checked out and get a quote for cleaning. While the tech was busy, I got chatting to him and it quickly became aware that this guy is a diamond in the rough - he has a pretty sophisticated understanding of the hardware underneath. So I asked him about the MacBook Pro.

Since I got the last I/O error, performance has been awful, and I've noticed that any time anything disk intensive kicks off (like Time Machine backup) the machine becomes almost unusable. Even music playing in iTunes starts stuttering or pausing for several seconds at a time.

The tech said that there's no SSD incompatibility that he's aware of, he knows of people using the exact same SSD in the exact same model MacBook Pro, and several others, without any problems. He asked me if I have an external screen connected. Yes I do. So he suggested I unplugged it, and close anything that might invoke the discrete GPU (Aperture, etc). He says the slowness behaviour sounds like the logic board/GPU issue kicking in.

By way of explanation, on the 2011 model at least, when an external screen is plugged in, the MBP automatically switches to the discrete GPU, regardless of whether you're doing anything intensive. What do you know, I unplugged the external screen, and the disk slowness evaporated.

So, MBP is dying, and the replacement program for the 2011 model has ended. So I'm going to keep the MBA for Aperture compatibility, since I haven't moved even a fraction of my library over to LR.

I only had one incident of an I/O error on the current SSD, so I'll consider this a coincidence until something indicates otherwise. I'll look into baking the MBP's logic board or attacking it with a heat gun - see if I can salvage it somehow. It's sad because this laptop doesn't lack performance for anything I do. It's kept up with my newer higher resolution cameras. Even 4K video - while it can't do the resolution - is workable in iMovie and Premiere Elements.

Oh well.