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Are SSD speeds decaying?

S

Shredder-

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 4, 2012
161
16
Ive had an SSD in my MBP late 2011 13" for about 15-16 months. When I first tried out the speedtest through Blackmagic - the write/read excelled. Nowadays they are struggling at 120 mb/s.

If its worth mentioning, its a 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD.

I generally feel that apps load slower, and frankly - I think Mavericks made my computer even slower.
Any suggestions on what to do?


My crazy conspiracy theory is that apple intentionally slows "older" macbooks down through updates to force newer purchases.
 
Speed of SSD is sometimes affected by how much storage you are using. If you are writing a lot of data, the SSD may be throttling you to assure it reaches its warranty point. Not sure if trim will help you, unless its in full time use. SSDs typically do housekeeping in the background, but if you are transferring data often, it just doesn't have enough time to do the housekeeping.

Now for a typical user, the SSD shouldn't be slowing down unless it has some bad memory chips its trying to work around, or it is reaching the end of its service life... which should be 5+ years.

Could be other things in the laptop slowing it down, a bad peripheral... RAM... indexing... what does activity monitor say is going on?
 
I found that speed seemed to be slowing down on my 2011 15" with Samsung SSD. Eventually I succummbed to enabling TRIM - but it did seem to fix the problem
 
Did you upgrade to Mavericks or do a clean install? In my experience, a clean install is the way to go. An upgrade carries across all sorts of unwanted junk.
 
Steve121178 said:
Did you upgrade to Mavericks or do a clean install? In my experience, a clean install is the way to go. An upgrade carries across all sorts of unwanted junk.
Click to expand...

I simply did an upgrade




Could be other things in the laptop slowing it down, a bad peripheral... RAM... indexing... what does activity monitor say is going on?
Click to expand...

Well.. nothing unsual in the activity monitor.. spotlight generally low energy impact. dont know really... the fans go nuts sometimes though, when I dont have enough RAM. Currently sitting on the default 4 GB, but recently ordered 8 GB - just waiting for it to arrive, not sure if its gonna fix my issues though

worth mentioning is that my battery has really gone south since upgrading to mavericks..


I found that speed seemed to be slowing down on my 2011 15" with Samsung SSD. Eventually I succummbed to enabling TRIM - but it did seem to fix the problem
Click to expand...

What does TRIM actually do?
 
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TRIM is the most important thing on a modern SSD. Without TRIM your SSD will eventually grind to a halt.

Unlike in an HDD where new data can just be written on top of old data. In an SSD the old data has to be physically deleted first. This happens in the background and is also called garbage collection. TRIM is this garbage collection, without it any SSD will become slower and slower to the point where it's like a slow HDD.

No Mavericks did not ruin your SSD, you did by not enabling TRIM. Enable it and after a while I assure you, your system will be running like new.

There's zero reason not to have TRIM enabled, it's absolutely essential. The first SSD's on the market didn't have stuff like TRIM and they suffered bad for it. All you need to do is have TRIM enabled and then you don't need to worry about your SSD ever slowing down (well provided it's not too full).
 
SCOLANATOR said:
TRIM is the most important thing on a modern SSD. Without TRIM your SSD will eventually grind to a halt.

Unlike in an HDD where new data can just be written on top of old data. In an SSD the old data has to be physically deleted first. This happens in the background and is also called garbage collection. TRIM is this garbage collection, without it any SSD will become slower and slower to the point where it's like a slow HDD.

No Mavericks did not ruin your SSD, you did by not enabling TRIM. Enable it and after a while I assure you, your system will be running like new.

There's zero reason not to have TRIM enabled, it's absolutely essential. The first SSD's on the market didn't have stuff like TRIM and they suffered bad for it. All you need to do is have TRIM enabled and then you don't need to worry about your SSD ever slowing down (well provided it's not too full).
Click to expand...

One thing the OP never mentioned is how much of his SSD is being used. Testing has shown that SSDs will get slower as they near full capacity:

Why SSDs Slow Down As You Fill Them Up (How To Geek)

Also, you have to use a third party tool like Trim Enabler to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs. OS X has the ability to implement it for Apple-branded SSds (the ones shipping with Macs).
 
dmccloud said:
One thing the OP never mentioned is how much of his SSD is being used. Testing has shown that SSDs will get slower as they near full capacity:

Why SSDs Slow Down As You Fill Them Up (How To Geek)

Also, you have to use a third party tool like Trim Enabler to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs. OS X has the ability to implement it for Apple-branded SSds (the ones shipping with Macs).
Click to expand...

I always keep mine at or below 50% capacity to ensure best performance. :D
 
If you recently upgraded, know that the upgrade process will usually turn TRIM off, even if it was on before.

I've been caught out by this a couple of times now.

Go check your TRIM status and if off, turn it on.
 
SCOLANATOR said:
I always keep mine at or below 50% capacity to ensure best performance. :D
Click to expand...

Because I still use an external HDD for my iTunes content and my Aperture/iPhoto libraries, I'm barely using 30% of my SSD right now. But I did get this machine with a goal of future-proofing it to some degree.
 
Shredder- said:
Ive had an SSD in my MBP late 2011 13" for about 15-16 months. When I first tried out the speedtest through Blackmagic - the write/read excelled. Nowadays they are struggling at 120 mb/s.

If its worth mentioning, its a 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD.

I generally feel that apps load slower, and frankly - I think Mavericks made my computer even slower.
Any suggestions on what to do?


My crazy conspiracy theory is that apple intentionally slows "older" macbooks down through updates to force newer purchases.
Click to expand...

Use the TRIM enabler app here to enable TRIM on your SSD. Then afterward boot to single user mode (command-s boot) and enter the command "fsck -fy" (without the quotes). That will TRIM all free space on the drive and hopefully restore performance.

Once the fsck routine is complete type in reboot to restart your Mac.
 
dmccloud said:
Because I still use an external HDD for my iTunes content and my Aperture/iPhoto libraries, I'm barely using 30% of my SSD right now. But I did get this machine with a goal of future-proofing it to some degree.
Click to expand...

Same for me, but more for resale as I am itching to get the Maxwell upgrade when it comes out. But I also run Windows 7 on here with a ton of games, as well as Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes library (not that big) so I would say 512GB is perfect for me, I was worried at first that maybe I should have gone for the 1TB but I'm happy with what I got. The SSD speeds are just insane and haven't slowed in the slightest since the day it came out the box. This was my first Mac (after years of building high end gaming rigs) and it's possibly the single best purchase I've ever made.
 
Shredder- said:
What does TRIM actually do?
Click to expand...

There are a few articles about that describe it somewhat like http://www.techspot.com/news/52835-...-need-for-trim-overprovisioning-and-more.html

TRIM is a way for the OS to tell the SSD which data sectors/blocks are still valid and which are deleted and therefore can be cleaned up for the next use.

Unlike rotational HDs, SSDs take much more time to overwrite a memory location than to write to a zeroed out location. SSDs have complex schemes that routes writes to zeroed locations most of the time and then reassemble the larger memory block as part as housekeeping. Its complicated because there are technology limitations. It usually takes one much reading and study to thoroughly understand the theory and practice. The SSD firmware controls the memory block assignment to virtual sectors, there is no physical link to a specific location like a rotational hard drive. The SSD firmware assigns memory blocks to sectors dynamically and the assignments change over time, to squeeze the most performance out of the technology.

The over simplified nutshell is the more free space (zeroed/erased memory) within the SSD the faster the write process goes. But the SSD has no way of knowing what is valid and invalid (deleted), so eventually the SSD may get into a bind moving data around. Telling the SSD which locations are deleted, allows the SSD to erase (zeroize) blocks of memory, reducing the amount of ones and zeroes it needs to housekeep and giving it more room to wiggle. The SSD is happier and therefore more responsive :).

TRIM is completely unnecessary for an rotational HD as a HD overwrites at the same speed as a write onto a fresh sector. There is no need to be fancy about it.
 
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dmccloud said:
One thing the OP never mentioned is how much of his SSD is being used. Testing has shown that SSDs will get slower as they near full capacity:

Why SSDs Slow Down As You Fill Them Up (How To Geek)

Also, you have to use a third party tool like Trim Enabler to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs. OS X has the ability to implement it for Apple-branded SSds (the ones shipping with Macs).
Click to expand...

i did run some command in terminal, and the "TRIM Support" in SATA/SATA-expressen went from "No" to "Yes" - im on a samsung ssd. is TRIM enabled if the it says "Yes".. just because it says its supported, does that mean its actually enabled?



One thing the OP never mentioned is how much of his SSD is being used. Testing has shown that SSDs will get slower as they near full capacity
Click to expand...

I use 141/195 on the OS partion, and 50/60 on the bootcamp partion


edit: wow, just by running the terminal command and rebooting, my speeds through blackmagic is almost maxed out
 
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