imac 2011 ssd swap - successful but..

[fleshkopter]

2011 core i7 w/BTO ssd (toshiba) , recently got a wild hare and decided to replace stock ssd with Samsung 840 evo 512 GB, and move the apple ssd to optical bay. All went well, both were working fine although using Samsung as boot drive, startup times were not at all faster, maybe even slower. Transfer rates were very fast though, above 500 MB/s both read and write. installed windows 7 on new boot camp partition , worked fine although booting back to 10.9.3 from there sometimes hung. Oh and used unix commands from http://chameleon.alessandroboschini.it/faq.php to enable trim, no trouble.
anyway, being a new drive i was checking out smart attributes with DriveDX and finally it dawned on me that the samsung drive was getting an increased power recovery count every time I put my comp to sleep. The apple ssd has like 16 of them over 3 years, this samsung has 16 after 3 days. I read about this happening in mac laptops, only solution i saw was switching drive bays which is not really an option here. I was wondering if anyone has installed their own SSD in this model iMac and not had the same issue? Has anyone else bothered to check this SMART attribute after a seemingly successful install? It can be very bad for an ssd to have this count continuously increasing or so I read. Nevertheless i think this one is going back to amazon if they will take it. Is there a non apple ssd that won't do this in a 2011 imac? Thanks for any input

 

[macthefork]

I put a Crucial 480 GB M500 SSD into my iMac, connecting it to the second SATA connector on the Logic Board. Since I left the original HDD in place, I placed the SSD behind the Optical Drive and used Connecting cables from OWC.

I've not had the SMART Atribute problem you mention with this SSD or an earlier SSD that I installed from OWC. (The OWC SSD was later removed.) I haven't used DriveDX. I've used Tech Tools Pro, and SMART Utility to check the SMART attributes.

 

[fleshkopter]

I have notice a lot of people have chosen Crucial. Would you mind looking at the power recovery count attribute on that drive ? And how long have you had it in your mac? thanks for the reply

 

[macthefork]

I didn't see that exact attribute on my utilities, so I downloaded DriveDX.

For the Crucial, I still didn't see that exact SMART attribute you mention under the Health Indicators. However, Samsung's site states that the Power Recovery Count on the Samsung SMART Attributes Readout is the same as the Unexpected Power Loss Count (as may be specified by other manufacturers.)

On my Crucial, the Unexpected Power Loss count is 17. Power Cycle count is 1612.

This Crucial has been installed for about one year, now. My iMac is usually put to sleep multiple times daily, and only rebooted occasionally (every couple of weeks) to clear caches and stuff.

Keep in mind that, as mentioned above, each drive manufacturer specifies how their firmware will display the SMART attributes. In doing a quick web search, there seem to be some questions about that attribute showing excessive counts on the Samsung.

 

[fleshkopter]

thanks so much for the info. I went ahead and ordered an m550, hoping it will work out better than the samsung

 

[fleshkopter]

update

ok , got the m550 , put it in today, both restart and sleep have no effect on unexpected power loss count perhaps not quite as snappy as 840 evo but i'll take reliability over that any day. So far so good, thank you Macthefork!

 

[macthefork]

My M500 didn't seem as snappy until I enabled TRIM... Now it's the fasted SSD I've had in mine. (the other was an OWC SSD)

 

[fleshkopter]

TRIM is definitely enabled and functioning . I wasn't implying it was slow by any means, in fact if I run black magic i get near or above 500MB/s read and write. I think the EVO has a speed edge over it with smaller reads and writes etc. Still plenty fast and I am happy. I like that Crucial builds in a lot of safety mechanisms for data as well.