Problem with SSD!

[Droid1]

Hello.
Im having a problem with my mbp(mid 2010). It seems that the write speed has gone pretty bad, especially for 4k blocks.
I had spilled beer on my laptop a while back, had it cleaned and seemed to work fine, i dont know wether or not this had any effect on my ssd, but i guess it's important enough to note.
The reason i decided to check it is that i felt the ssd performance being a little sluggish.

Anyway, what would you suggest me to do? Maybe im just being paranoid and those numbers are perfectly fine after a one year usage.

 

[Droid1]

I erased ssd and the perfromance seems to have increased and yet it's a bit too slow, but i found out that my ssd doesnt have TRIM support and TrimEnabler doesnt work for me.
Any advice would be nice.

 

[jenzjen]

What were your original speeds, and check your manufacturer's site to see if they have any restore type (like Intel's toolbox) software.

 

[derbothaus]

What manufacturer is SSD? Kind of important if you want advice.

Sorry, just enlarged the photo.

Why does Trim enabler not work for you?
It would have trim support in Win.
Those numbers are not fine. Beer would have taken down the entire thing if it was a factor.

 

[Droid1]

Honestly i dont know what the original speeds were, i came to possesion of the laptop when it was already used.


Tried using TrimEnabler, patched, rebooted but it doesnt have any effect, it still shows trim as disabled.

I also tried patching the extension by following steps in the link, but it still didnt enable TRIM.

http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/


Spent a lot of time in google, but i cant seem to find anything useful, is there really no way to fix my ssd?

 

[derbothaus]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1125400/

Someone who watches this thread could probably help you out or give you reason's why it isn't working. How full is the SSD? Speed can vary depending on how full the drive is unfortunately even though that was one of the supposed benefits of going solid state.

 

[shortcut3d]

You could try digilloyd tool to restore the SSD. Or you could try using Disk Utilities to secure erase. The best way to fully restore performance on older drives is to restore to a backup drive, then secure erase the entire SSD drive followed by restoring the backup back to the SSD.

 

[Macman45]

I Wonder

If that drive IS suffering issues. If the beer spill had caused damage you would know by now....It's solid state. My MBA has an Apple branded SSD and trim works fine. Might be worth letting an Apple Store guru test it, even if its nor covered, speaking nicely and they will help.......After all they want to sell you a newbie if it's U/S

 

[awer25]

Maybe you just have an older SSD and 200+MB/s is normal.

 

[Droid1]

I erased disk and reinstalled lion, so apparently it's empty. But does erasing the disk, also replaces the information with zeros?

The weird problem is that, Erase free space is grayed out for me and i cant seem to find the answer why. It says "Erase free space is not avaliable on this type of drive". For others it doesnt seem to be grayed out.

I figured if i could fill the rest of the free space with one huge file and then erased the disk again, i would get the same effect, but dont know how to do it yet. Maybe someone could help me out with this?

 

[Weaselboy]

The best way to fully restore performance on older drives is to restore to a backup drive, then secure erase the entire SSD drive followed by restoring the backup back to the SSD.

Unless the drive has TRIM enabled, I don't see how that would do anything but maybe reduce fragmentation a little, and that's not the problem here.

I erased disk and reinstalled lion, so apparently it's empty. But does erasing the disk, also replaces the information with zeros?

The weird problem is that, Erase free space is grayed out for me and i cant seem to find the answer why. It says "Erase free space is not avaliable on this type of drive". For others it doesnt seem to be grayed out.

I figured if i could fill the rest of the free space with one huge file and then erased the disk again, i would get the same effect, but dont know how to do it yet. Maybe someone could help me out with this?

With Lion the erase free space command cannot be on an active boot partition. You should be able to boot from the recovery partition and secure erase from there, but as I mentioned above, I don't see how that is going to fix anything.

It appears the write speed of your drive is slowing due to the absence of TRIM or a good equivalent garbage collection scheme in the SSD firmware.

This may be an older drive that does not support TRIM even with the hack.

 

[Droid1]

I had tried Erasing free space when booted from HD Recovery, even tried when booted from usb lion install.
It is still grayed out and i believe it has something to do with the drive itself, as it says "Erase free space is not avaliable on this type of drive".

At the moment im zero-ing the disk as i write. Used dd command in the terminal, which does the trick.

The good news is that the write speed went up 3 times after i had erased the disk and did a clean install of lion. So there's progress.
I'll post my progress after zero-ing.

I just wish there was a way to enable TRIM. Really bugs me out...


I can also note that the SSD wasnt installed by me, it came with the macbook pro from apple.

 

[derbothaus]

I can also note that the SSD wasnt installed by me, it came with the macbook pro from apple.

Then shouldn't it have shipped with TRIM support? Can't you take it to Apple have them worry about your issue?
Apples SSD's are not even close to being what I would call fast. But if you feel performance has degraded, it may be worth the call. Even out of warranty.

 

[Droid1]

So i erased the disk, zero-ed and erased again. Installed Lion and i could already notice a significant increase in speed. Approximately from 15mb/s to about 90-100mb/s.

Im fine with these speeds, but the only matter which is left is the problem with TRIM support.
I will wait for a while as i've read that TRIM enabler 2 is soon to come out, if it doesnt help i'll contact Apple and see what they say.

Thank you all

 

[shortcut3d]

So i erased the disk, zero-ed and erased again. Installed Lion and i could already notice a significant increase in speed. Approximately from 15mb/s to about 90-100mb/s.

Im fine with these speeds, but the only matter which is left is the problem with TRIM support.
I will wait for a while as i've read that TRIM enabler 2 is soon to come out, if it doesnt help i'll contact Apple and see what they say.

Thank you all

Glad erase free space helped.

Basically, this command is equivalent to Trim and sets free space to 0's which is ready to write immediately for the controller. Otherwise the SSD controller would have to erase / write a 0 before writing the data. Trim just does this actively after a file is deleted, modified or moved.

Free space is just portions of the drive that are marked as available for writing new data. In my field we recovery from free space all the time Fortunately, the corporate world has yet to widely adopt SSDs.

 

[Droid1]

Also i was wondering, when zero-ing with dd command, how many bytes for a pack should i choose?

 

[Weaselboy]

Glad erase free space helped.

Basically, this command is equivalent to Trim and sets free space to 0's which is ready to write immediately for the controller. Otherwise the SSD controller would have to erase / write a 0 before writing the data. Trim just does this actively after a file is deleted, modified or moved.

Free space is just portions of the drive that are marked as available for writing new data. In my field we recovery from free space all the time Fortunately, the corporate world has yet to widely adopt SSDs.

I believe you are mistaken. Read over the TRIM hack thread and other resources about how TRIM works. Erasing free space without TRIM active does not have the same effect as TRIM.