2019 27" iMac boots slow after 2 months of mounting blade SSD

[Jefke Peeters]

In January of this year did I replace the Blade SSD of my 2019 27" Fusion iMac .
I kept the original HDD of 2TB just for storage.
When starting recovery for the first time, this computer saw two separate drives, so I could install the OS on the Blade.

Works very fast, the first times after starting from zero, I was up and running after about 10 secs. Amazing.

Normally this computer always stays in standby.
This summer I had to shut it down often because of thunderstorms.
When powering back on from zero, out of the blue it takes about 2 mins before the progress bar proceeds from the middle.
Once powered up, he always works very fast.

Booting in verbose mode learns me this:
AMFIInitializelocalSigningPublicKey: failed to get local signing public key (e00002bc)'.

On this line, he waits more as a minute.

What could this be?

I installed the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB. Production date was October 2021. I did made attention on this date, I knew from software issues on older versions of this blade.

Thanks
Gert

 

[Backslashnl1]

Hi Jefke, unfortunately I have bad news. It's because of the Samung SSD. I had the exact same blade SSD and had simulair experience with boot times which got slower when the disk is getting more used. You can read about my experience in this post and my 'solution' here.

What I did is replace the Samsung SSD with an original Apple SSD. But you could also use another brand like Crucial or Western Digital. I did not find a way to solve the issue.

I don't think your issue has to do with the verbose line. You should look up your last boot trim times to be sure.

 

[Jefke Peeters]

Indeed, when I put in terminal this "trims took" command, I got: "disk2 scan took 58.581376 s, trims took 58.446543 s

This seems to be the reason.

Very strange fact, this computer is fast as hell writing and reading to this SSD once it's booted.

 

[Backslashnl1]

Indeed, also this SSD works fine with Windows.. unfortunately it seems to be unsuited for macOS.

 

[Jefke Peeters]

I've read something about disabling the "trim".
Could this solve the issue? I know this could shorten the lifespan of my SSD... But if Apple doesn't solve this in the next MacOS (Ventura?), this SSD is worthless for me. It's not an easy job to replace this thing...

Regarding the specs, for my usecase this SSD should live 30+ years.
After 5 years, this iMac is 8 years old and definitely time for replace it

 

[ignatius345]

Very strange fact, this computer is fast as hell writing and reading to this SSD once it's booted.

I guess you could just make peace with waiting 5 minutes at boot time. Kind of a drag but I don't find I have to reboot my Macs more than every few weeks unless there's an update or I install something that requires it...

 

[Backslashnl1]

I've read something about disabling the "trim".
Could this solve the issue? I know this could shorten the lifespan of my SSD... But if Apple doesn't solve this in the next MacOS (Ventura?), this SSD is worthless for me. It's not an easy job to replace this thing...

Regarding the specs, for my usecase this SSD should live 30+ years.
After 5 years, this iMac is 8 years old and definitely time for replace it

I also tried disabling trim, but it didn't help for me.
You could try indeed if it is solved with macOS Ventura, perhaps with a beta version.

 

[Jefke Peeters]

I guess you could just make peace with waiting 5 minutes at boot time. Kind of a drag but I don't find I have to reboot my Macs more than every few weeks unless there's an update or I install something that requires it...

Indeed. But I hope it only happens with booting and after a while not while working.

You could try indeed if it is solved with macOS Ventura, perhaps with a beta version.

It's my daily "working" machine and I have to trust on this thing. Installing beta's is suicide 🤨
When the problem is and stays limited with slow boots, I don't do anything before the final release of Ventura.

Monterey is very buggy. I also own a 15" 2017 MBP. While going to sleep sometimes he gives a kernel panic. Kernel panic says its hardware. (Motherboard is replaced by myself, so I was afraid of a defective one )
When I downgraded to Catalina, he was fine for 4 months. Even battery time of 14h instead of 7 with Monterey.
Made the upgrade to the version released last week and again the intermittent kernel panics. Battery time is slightly better.