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Fusion SSD very slow with Mavericks

G

gogo51

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 26, 2013
4
0
Hi Everyone,

I have a Late 2012 Mac Mini with 2.3 quad core i7, 16g ram, 1TB of HDD and Samsung 840 250G SSD installed. I recently bought the samsung SSD in order to create my own Fusion drive but Since the expected release of Mavericks I decided to wait for it.

Soon as Mavericks was released I tried to create a DIY Fusion drive. I have done so with the help of OWC Fusion drive creation guide. and in theory managed to create it successfully.

The problem is that SSD start performing VERY SLOW!. Before the Fusion drive I had 250 Write and 500 Read, now I have between 40-50 Write and 120 Read.

Can anyone help me with this? I am pretty new in the mac world and not sure how to deal with it. I tried looking in forums (including this one) but could find solution.

Thanks,
 
When did you notice the reduction in speed? It can take a while for the data in your Fusion Drive to settle between the SSD and HDD depending upon usage.

In general, if you access something enough you should see yourself getting SSD read speeds for it, while less used or larger files will be at HDD speeds only. When writing files you should see SSD speeds up to about 4gb, as that's how much free space Core Storage reserves as a write-buffer before it's forced to write out to the HDD instead.


Also, it's worth noting that many drive testing programs perform random read/writes across the entire device, which means your recorded speed will be some mixture between the SSD and HDD speeds, and since the HDD is usually much larger that value will most likely be closer to the HDD speeds.


For example, I have a 120gb SSD in a Fusion Drive with a 3tb RAID-0 arrangement. 120gb means that pretty much all of my most commonly used opens open from the SSD, along with the OS itself, really quickly, I mean it more than halved my startup time (from when the Apple logo appears).

But with such a huge HDD component my speeds for everything else haven't really changed, the main advantage is that I no longer have to manually manage which files go on the SSD and which go on the HDD.
 
Hi thank you,

I notices the slow speed as soon as I was done installing Mavericks on the new Fusion drive. I also used the command in terminal which shows disk activity, and havn't seen any activity on neither drive.

Right now I'm back on the single HDD with new Mavericks installed, I formatted the SSD and it's still showing extremely low read\write speeds. It seems the Fusion process or the Mavericks installation changed something in the drive.

I tried so look for firmware updated, but mine is the latest.

Please help...
 
does the computer seem slow or are you just referencing benchmark read/write values?

if you're using a disk speed test program, often they use large packets 1gb and up for testing. The Fusion automatically pushes extra large files to the HDD portion but i forget the size minimum
 
I did use Blackmagic Speed test, but even without it I haven't felt a big change.

Is there other test I can see to check the performance of the SSD? even if I just copy some photos to it, it doesn't feel fast as it used to be before I installed Mavericks on it.
 
I have the same issue... My Fusion drive was super quick before upgrading to Mavericks. Now my Speedtest does 50MB/s write and 100MB/s read...
 
I have exactly the sale issue with my iMac 2012.
I have built a fusion drive with an external Lacie SSD TB drive.
It was working perfectly and very fast with ML.
Now it is slow with mavericks ...
Bad results in blackmagic.
I have tried a clean install after recreating my fusion drive with mavericks, same result.
Maybe it does not like DIY fusion drives ?
 
I think there is a real problem with DIY fusion drives with external drives.
I have noticed another problem with mavericks.
Bootcamp is not able to create a windows partition. It was working perfectly with mountain lion...
There is something broken with non-apple fusion drives in mavericks ...
And it' s difficult to send feedback to Apple as this setup is not really supported ...
 
I am thinking about Mountain Lion downgrade ...
I am affraid about my iPhoto library, I hope it can be downgraded.
For the moment Mavericks has a bug that is really important for me.
The bad support for DIY fusion drives is a big fail !
 
Following the Mavericks upgrade, my HDD equipped iMac has also been really slow, as if disk I/O was somehow severely affected. I do not have an SSD in my machine.
 
I'm seeing the performance hit as well with a DIY Fusion drive.
MacBook Pro mid-2010, Crucial M4 512GB (HDD Bay) and Western Digital Blue 1TB (Optibay).

Blackmagic speed test gives around a 40-50MB/s write and 240MB/s read, so reading is fine but writing is a lot slower than it was under Mountain Lion.

I'm also getting quite a bit of beach balling and general slowness in Finder (and save dialogues), along with slow loading of files in quick look.
 
Dark Dragoon said:
I'm seeing the performance hit as well with a DIY Fusion drive.
MacBook Pro mid-2010, Crucial M4 512GB (HDD Bay) and Western Digital Blue 1TB (Optibay).

Blackmagic speed test gives around a 40-50MB/s write and 240MB/s read, so reading is fine but writing is a lot slower than it was under Mountain Lion.

I'm also getting quite a bit of beach balling and general slowness in Finder (and save dialogues), along with slow loading of files in quick look.
Click to expand...

Exact same issue as you. You're also the first I saw to comment on the Finder problem (I thought it was just me that was having that).
 
tredstone said:
Exact same issue as you. You're also the first I saw to comment on the Finder problem (I thought it was just me that was having that).
Click to expand...

I've seen other people comment on the Finder and Quicklook slowdowns, for example https://discussions.apple.com/message/23512472.

Though I'm not sure whether its linked to the Fusion Drive issues, or whether something else is the cause.

Later on if I have time I may do a clean reinstall and test with either a fresh Fusion Drive or just the SSD on its own.
 
Same problem!

Hi, I think I have the same problem. Yesterday I created successfully my first DIY FD using internal 1TB HDD and external LaCie TB 120GB Rugged SSD (I know external storage is not officialy supported). Using OS 10.9, FD created on same version.

Everything is fine and running (recovery hd and bootcamp partitions stayed untouched, complete recovery of TM backup 450GB).

System is lot faster - booting with 5 desktops and lot apps under 30 s, Adobe LR, PS around 5s.

I have only one problem with results of Blackmagic benchmark - write is inbetween 50-100 MB/s and read inbetween 200-380 MB/s (see the screenshot). Quite a bit span in results, sometimes faster sometimes slower (once I measured write 270 MB/s). What I am concerned about are write speed, because when I copy 2 GB file on FD it shows on SSD 200 MB/s and more using iostat.

Dont know if it is just problem with my benchmark or FD is really slow, what does not seem regarding the practical use experience.

Thanks for answer and your opinion&experince!
 

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It's exactly the same for me.
Overall performance is not so bad but blackmagic bad results are strange.
Something is not working well, and it's impossible for me to recreate my bootcamp volume.
 
rbart said:
I am thinking about Mountain Lion downgrade ...
I am affraid about my iPhoto library, I hope it can be downgraded.
For the moment Mavericks has a bug that is really important for me.
The bad support for DIY fusion drives is a big fail !
Click to expand...
You would need a backup of your iPhoto library from before the updated version of iPhoto update the library format.
 
Dark Dragoon said:
I'm seeing the performance hit as well with a DIY Fusion drive.
MacBook Pro mid-2010, Crucial M4 512GB (HDD Bay) and Western Digital Blue 1TB (Optibay).

Blackmagic speed test gives around a 40-50MB/s write and 240MB/s read, so reading is fine but writing is a lot slower than it was under Mountain Lion.

I'm also getting quite a bit of beach balling and general slowness in Finder (and save dialogues), along with slow loading of files in quick look.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is also my problem with DIY FIY based on external SSD. It means, that "external" is not problem, because yours FD is working internal. So I think, it is kind of problem in Mavericks affecting most of DIY FDs...
 
Maybe it's not a real problem, maybe it's only a Blackmagic issue ?
I can't say if my Mac is slower with Mavericks than ML ...
After setup and for some hours it was really slow, but now it's almost normal.
 
Yes, real perfomance is quite good, never had FD before, but booting in 20s with 5 desktops and lot of programs loaded on the start is quite normal for FD arrangement...

I think I'll leave it like this for some time, see if it is also stable, if there wont be some update to blackmagic and maybe then I'll defuse FD and install Maverick just on external SSD and put all data on internal HDD, which is not so pleasant as having all in one FD.
 
So I've just setup my Mac from scratch with a new Fusion Drive setup and a clean install of Mavericks.

However the Fusion Drive appears to be working the wrong way round, checking what its doing using "iostat disk0 disk1 1" and it appears to be keeping everything on the hard drive (disk1) and not hitting the SSD (disk0) at all. :confused:

It shows up as being a Fusion Drive in About This Mac (System information), so it appears to be recognised as such. Even if it wasn't I would have expected it to have just filled the SSD (disk0) first and not shifted any data around.

EDIT: Tried recreating the Fusion Drive again, this time I didn't install the OS onto it. Appears to have the same problem, when copying data onto the partition it's using the hard drive and not the SSD. I was following this guide for setting it up. Testing this time was done using a full install of Mavericks on an external drive.
 
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