Samsung 830 SSD Slow Boot Times

[BAYsic]

Hello everyone,

I first installed my Samsung 830 SSD about a year ago. I have loved the performance and speed since day one. I had always experienced boot times of approximately 12 seconds.

Recently, I noticed that boot times had seemed much longer, about 45 seconds. Moreover, shutting down took well over a minute. After some hunting around, I did a PRAM reset (no difference) and cleared the the kext caches (boot times reduced to about 30 seconds, shutdowns still slow).

I am not sure what the deal is. I doubt a year of casual use has degraded my SSD, so I think some setting is screwed up somewhere. I don't know exactly when the boot times started slowing down, but I only recently noticed it.

I have upgraded to Mavericks (so that could be one culprit) and recently downloaded Chameleon SSD Optimizer (before, I only used TRIM Enabler but decided to go with Chameleon since it offers additional functionality).

Any thoughts on what the issue might be? I have the correct start up disk selected and confirmed the start up disk after clearing the kext caches.

Thanks in advance!

Edit:

Here is a screen shot of a speed test in case readers find it helpful. Note, I am on a mid-2009 MBPro (SATA 3gb/s).

 

[yjchua95]

Hello everyone,

I first installed my Samsung 830 SSD about a year ago. I have loved the performance and speed since day one. I had always experienced boot times of approximately 12 seconds.

Recently, I noticed that boot times had seemed much longer, about 45 seconds. Moreover, shutting down took well over a minute. After some hunting around, I did a PRAM reset (no difference) and cleared the the kext caches (boot times reduced to about 30 seconds, shutdowns are fast again).

I am not sure what the deal is. I doubt a year of casual use has degraded my SSD, so I think some setting is screwed up somewhere. I don't know exactly when the boot times started slowing down, but I only recently noticed it.

I have upgraded to Mavericks (so that could be one culprit) and recently downloaded Chameleon SSD Optimizer (before, I only used TRIM Enabler but decided to go with Chameleon since it offers additional functionality).

Any thoughts on what the issue might be? I have the correct start up disk selected and confirmed the start up disk after clearing the kext caches.

Thanks in advance!

Edit:

Here is a screen shot of a speed test in case readers find it helpful. Note, I am on a mid-2009 MBPro (SATA 3gb/s).

Try downloading DriveDx (free 10 day trial) and check your SSD's health.

Bear in mind that SSDs have limited read/write cycles. Benchmarking with Blackmagic will wear it down, so I don't use it unless I want to show off to my mates

On another note, the 840 Pro uses MLC, and can last much longer (7-8 years under heavy usage).

 

[BAYsic]

Try downloading DriveDx (free 10 day trial) and check your SSD's health.

Bear in mind that SSDs have limited read/write cycles. Benchmarking with Blackmagic will wear it down, so I don't use it unless I want to show off to my mates

On another note, the 840 Pro uses MLC, and can last much longer (7-8 years under heavy usage).

I downloaded DriveDx and the drive is in excellent health. Nearly all indicators were at 100%, with only a few at 99%. Nothing lower than 99%.

I almost never run a benchmark using Blackmagic, have no reason to do so. From what I gather from various posts on this forum, my numbers seem to be right where they should be. Am I right?

 

[yjchua95]

I downloaded DriveDx and the drive is in excellent health. Nearly all indicators were at 100%, with only a few at 99%. Nothing lower than 99%.

I almost never run a benchmark using Blackmagic, have no reason to do so. From what I gather from various posts on this forum, my numbers seem to be right where they should be. Am I right?

Since it's running at 3Gbps, it's normal. But what concerns me is your boot time. Looks like you may have a few bad sectors. Have you repaired disk permissions yet?

 

[BAYsic]

Since it's running at 3Gbps, it's normal. But what concerns me is your boot time. Looks like you may have a few bad sectors. Have you repaired disk permissions yet?

I am repairing permissions now. I know this usually takes quite a while, but it is definitely taking a lot longer than usual. I will try a few reboots after it completes to see if boot times are back to where they used to be.

EDIT:

It took approximately 15 minutes to complete repairing permissions. I shutdown and restarted and my boot up times are still slow.

I also noted one other issue during the repair process. The details window states:

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.

It said nothing else until the repair process was complete.

 

[Gunlance]

Is there anything connected to the computer while booting? One of my mice would hang up a quick boot as the computer would try to boot from it.

 

[BAYsic]

Is there anything connected to the computer while booting? One of my mice would hang up a quick boot as the computer would try to boot from it.

Nothing is connected to the laptop.

 

[Quinoky]

Could you download xbench, run only the disk test and post results?

 

[BAYsic]

Could you download xbench, run only the disk test and post results?

Here are the results.

 

[Quinoky]

Seems normal for SATA 3gb/s.. It probably has something to do with the way the 830 handles garbage collection. It only starts cleaning up the drive when there is little to no IO activity (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review/6). I'm not sure to what extent TRIM is effective as a third party solution in Mac OS X, but your 830 probably has collected enough garbage over that one year period to slow it down anyway. I suppose you could try formatting the drive and start with a fresh install of Mavericks, if nothing else works.

 

[BAYsic]

Seems normal for SATA 3gb/s.. It probably has something to do with the way the 830 handles garbage collection. It only starts cleaning up the drive when there is little to no IO activity (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review/6). I'm not sure to what extent TRIM is effective as a third party solution in Mac OS X, but your 830 probably has collected enough garbage over that one year period to slow it down anyway. I suppose you could try formatting the drive and start with a fresh install of Mavericks, if nothing else works.

Hopefully that's not the case. I have had TRIM enabled since day 1 and I would think that if TRIM enabler and the other third party solutions were not effective, and degradation was noticeable in less than a year, we would have heard something by now (many other have been using an SSD with TRIM enabler for much longer than me).

What are people's thoughts on post #9 here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/os-x-upda...-minute-after-10-8-2-supplemental-update.html

I tried this and read through the log and found a few SMC errors during bootup. Could that be slowing down the system?

 

[Dopeyman]

Try a defrag....

Yes, I know some people say it won't work or it won't make a difference on a SSD, but the other day I looked at my SSD through Drive Genius and it was very heavily fragged and it even recommended a defrag (I have a 64GB M4 Crucial just as my startup)... So I booted from an external drive and defragged my SSD...

I noticed like a 5 second quicker startup....

Hey... It's worth a shot... Whatcha got to lose??

Other suggestion: Try a fresh install....

PS: This was on my iMac, not on a MB/P....