SSD upgrade, not getting results I should be?

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

Just did the SSD upgrade on my late 09 imac. I replaced the original HDD with a Samsung 830.

Process took me about 1 hour from start to finish. It's actually not that hard at all.

My boot time went from 45 seconds down to 15 or so. Apps load up quickly and overall responsiveness is a lot better.

However, I did a read/write test with BlackMagic and the results left me pretty disappointed. I know the SSD is working and all but these results are slower than Sata I speeds!

Specs are: 21.5" iMac, 3.06 GHz, 12GB ram.

simsaladimbamba · Dec 5, 2012

Go to Applications / Utilities / System Profiler (System Report) > Hardware > Serial ATA > your SSD > Negotiated Link Speed and tell us what it says there.

You can also use these applications to benchmark the speed of your SSD, to see, if it is the culprit:

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

simsaladimbamba said:
Go to Applications / Utilities / System Profiler (System Report) > Hardware > Serial ATA > your SSD > Negotiated Link Speed and tell us what it says there.

You can also use these applications to benchmark the speed of your SSD, to see, if it is the culprit:

AJA System Test

Xbench

Excellent. Thanks, I will report back this evening when I can test it out again.

yezza · Dec 5, 2012

Your read/write speeds can't be correct - performance indicates that your new drive is running fine.

Are you sure you haven't accidentally tested another (slower) attached drive?

There is no other drive-intensive process/app running while you did the test?

You could try a different software to check drive performance:
http://www.aja.com/en/products/software/

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

yezza said:
Your read/write speeds can't be correct - performance indicates that your new drive is running fine.

Are you sure you haven't accidentally tested another (slower) attached drive?

There is no other drive-intensive process/app running while you did the test?

You could try a different software to check drive performance:
http://www.aja.com/en/products/software/

I agree. I replaced the HDD so there is no other drive for it to test.

No applications or processes were running at the time either. Is there a way I can check to see what it is testing exactly?

In going to try the other software links you guys provided later this evening.

hfg · Dec 5, 2012

What brand of SSD did you buy (whoops, I see you have a Samsung)? Different disk tests will show different results as a result of the testing methodology.

For example, SSDs with SandForce controllers such as OWC and others, compress data as written. They will appear to be slow using BlackMagicDesign "DiskSpeedTest" which uses large blocks of un-compressable data for testing. These drives will test much better with the AJA disk test program.

If it actually "feels" slow, regardless of what testing shows, then you probably do have a problem somewhere. Your disk test results do appear to be slow, however, for a Samsung 830..

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

hfg said:
What brand of SSD did you buy (whoops, I see you have a Samsung)? Different disk tests will show different results as a result of the testing methodology.

For example, SSDs with SandForce controllers such as OWC and others, compress data as written. They will appear to be slow using BlackMagicDesign "DiskSpeedTest" which uses large blocks of un-compressable data for testing. These drives will test much better with the AJA disk test program.

If it actually "feels" slow, regardless of what testing shows, then you probably do have a problem somewhere. Your disk test results do appear to be slow, however, for a Samsung 830..

I'm trying not to get too caught up in the numbers. My boot time is about 15 seconds now and apps load up almost instantaneously and everything is very responsive overall.

I'm just hoping its the testing software issue and perhaps a different program will give me the actual results.

jkeekij · Dec 5, 2012

hfg said:
....Your disk test results do appear to be slow, however, for a Samsung 830..

What are you saying in regards to the Samsung 830? I have seen good reviews for that drive, is that not the case?

martinm0 · Dec 5, 2012

tonyy said:
I agree. I replaced the HDD so there is no other drive for it to test.

No applications or processes were running at the time either. Is there a way I can check to see what it is testing exactly?

In going to try the other software links you guys provided later this evening.

Check the negotiated link speeds and see if its listed as 1.5, 3 or 6 (Gb/s). I don't think the 2009's were using SATAIII speeds, so you may see only 3Gbs as the max.

hfg · Dec 5, 2012

jkeekij said:
What are you saying in regards to the Samsung 830? I have seen good reviews for that drive, is that not the case?

No, I said his test numbers seem to be a bit slower than others have seen with the Samsung 830 drive. The Samsung 830 is a great drive.

tyche · Dec 5, 2012

I replaced my 2010 iMac drive with a SSD (Kingston Hyper 3x) a couple days ago. Black Magic shows an increase from ~ 125 mb/s on the 1 TB platter disk to 245 mb/s which is in the ballpark for realistic channel performance for a sata II controller (probably a true max of 275 mb/s on sata II) on the iMac.

hfg · Dec 5, 2012

martinm0 said:
Check the negotiated link speeds and see if its listed as 1.5, 3 or 6 (Gb/s). I don't think the 2009's were using SATAIII speeds, so you may see only 3Gbs as the max.

I am thinking that a 2009 probably does have SATA-II interfaces which would limit the speed. However, I found some DiskSpeedTest results from my Mac Pro (also SATA-II) which are double (204/263) what he is seeing. I think the SSD I was testing at that time was a Crucial M4 in the standard Mac Pro disk tray.

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

Yep, I was expecting between 200-300 mb/s. 107 mb/s seems WAY too low for Sata II speeds.

martinm0 · Dec 5, 2012

tonyy said:
Yep, I was expecting between 200-300 mb/s. 107 mb/s seems WAY too low for Sata II speeds.

If it helps, I'm running a Crucial M4 128GB in a Seagate Thunderbolt sled (STAE121). My speeds are actually right around 300MB/s read and around 150-175MB/s read. Its connected at 6Gb/s.

Also, I saw online people confirming that the 2009 iMac is only SATAII.

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

martinm0 said:
If it helps, I'm running a Crucial M4 128GB in a Seagate Thunderbolt sled (STAE121). My speeds are actually right around 300MB/s read and around 150-175MB/s read. Its connected at 6Gb/s.

Also, I saw online people confirming that the 2009 iMac is only SATAII.

Yah, I saw that as well and totally fine with Sata II speeds. At 3 GB/s, that is a lot faster than what I'm getting now.

Once I check and confirm link speed, what if its 1.5 and not the suggested 3? Is that firmware related then?

martinm0 · Dec 5, 2012

tonyy said:
Once I check and confirm link speed, what if its 1.5 and not the suggested 3? Is that firmware related then?

You know, I'm not really sure if firmware would help here. My hope is that you are running SATAII; as you can see from my scores even at SATAIII I still seem to be running sort of slow for what the drive can do. I'm hoping its more of this Seagate sled, but I've actually had this running in a Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt until last night, and that enclosure only does SATAII and the speeds were closer to 220 read/120 write.

I've got a Sammy 256GB 830 coming in over the next few days. I'll test that out with the same hardware I have now and see how it stacks up to the Crucial for speeds.

Apple Corps · Dec 5, 2012

tonyy said:
Yah, I saw that as well and totally fine with Sata II speeds. At 3 GB/s, that is a lot faster than what I'm getting now.

Once I check and confirm link speed, what if its 1.5 and not the suggested 3? Is that firmware related then?

No - I believe it would be related to the chipset supporting the bus.

naiver12 · Dec 5, 2012

Maybe a pram-resett and smc-resett could help.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option (alt), P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-alt-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

and smc resett
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

jediDev · Dec 5, 2012

tonyy said:
Just did the SSD upgrade on my late 09 imac. I replaced the original HDD with a Samsung 830.

Process took me about 1 hour from start to finish. It's actually not that hard at all.

My boot time went from 45 seconds down to 15 or so. Apps load up quickly and overall responsiveness is a lot better.

However, I did a read/write test with BlackMagic and the results left me pretty disappointed. I know the SSD is working and all but these results are slower than Sata I speeds!

Specs are: 21.5" iMac, 3.06 GHz, 12GB ram.

Has spotlight finished indexing?

EPiCDiNGO · Dec 5, 2012

I have a mid 2010 Macbook Pro and i upgraded the HDD to a Samsung 830 256 SSD I just did a test now and the speed seems better than your speed but not as good as I expected but like you boot times and apps opening is super fast so no complaints here. :apple:

nasabaer · Dec 5, 2012

After replacing the Hard Drive with a SSD you ALWAYS should do a PRAM Reset.
I do it on all units, when i raplace the Hard Drive exactly for that reason.

iLondoner · Dec 5, 2012

I have a mid-2011 1.7GHz MacBook Air with Apple's standard 256GB SSD and I get similar sort of results to EPiCDiNGO.

pubjoe · Dec 5, 2012

yezza said:
Your read/write speeds can't be correct - performance indicates that your new drive is running fine.

I don't agree. The elimination of seek times results in a huge performance improvement even when there is a problem. The very early SSDs had a slower peak MB/s than mechanical hdds, and while being much slower at sequential tasks, and speedtests such as the software used here, they still thrashed hard disks in random access tasks.

Even with your reduced speed, 99% of the time you probably won't notice the problem. That said, it's still worth trying to fix somehow. Try copying a large file and see what speed you get in actual real use.

Did you change any cables?

tonyy · Dec 5, 2012

martinm0 said:
Check the negotiated link speeds and see if its listed as 1.5, 3 or 6 (Gb/s). I don't think the 2009's were using SATAIII speeds, so you may see only 3Gbs as the max.

I just checked: my negotiated link speed is 1.5

The link speed is 3.

I did a pram and smc reset and still the same. WTF.

----------

pubjoe said:
I don't agree. The elimination of seek times results in a huge performance improvement even when there is a problem. The very early SSDs had a slower peak MB/s than mechanical hdds, and while being much slower at sequential tasks, and speedtests such as the software used here, they still thrashed hard disks in random access tasks.

Even with your reduced speed, 99% of the time you probably won't notice the problem. That said, it's still worth trying to fix somehow. Try copying a large file and see what speed you get in actual real use.

Did you change any cables?

I didn't change any cables. I used the original SATA cable from the HDD and plugged it into the SSD. I'm only getting 1.5 negotiated link speed.

----------

jediDev said:
Has spotlight finished indexing?

Yep. There is no dot in the middle suggesting that it's indexing.

----------

naiver12 said:
Maybe a pram-resett and smc-resett could help.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option (alt), P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-alt-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

and smc resett
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Yup, just followed your advice and did a reset. Still no luck.

hfg · Dec 5, 2012

Wow ... sounds like you may have found your problem ... but why?

Was your SSD purchased new, packaged, from a reliable dealer, or from eBay?

I haven't heard of any cases of counterfeit SSD drives (lots of flash counterfeits running around).

You might see about returning it for a replacement.

SSD upgrade, not getting results I should be?

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