SSD getting slower - FIXED

[timsun]

Dear readers,

In 2013 i bought a mac mini, i decided to buy a ssd seperate because the price of an ssd build in by apple was way to expensive.

After some struggles I managed to get the ssd to work. I decided to buy a 480 GB OCZ Agility 3, 2.5" drive ( I added some drive information as an attachement, it's in dutch, but hope it helps!). I was getting speeds around 300mb/s write and read and i was a happy man. The mac was booting very fast and copying files around was realy quick and easy.

At the moment in 2015, i decided to do a speed drive test, because i noticed my mac was getting a bit slow. The ssd only reached 150 mb/s at the beginning and ended with a 120 mb/s. I have absolutely no idea when this happened and what i can do to make it faster.

I am just curious to find out if it's the ssd who slows down after almost 2 years of use or if it is a malfunction. Or if it is mac who's slowing down the drive, and that a fresh setup helps to make it faster.

I hope anyone can help me out and give some advise on how to make it faster.

Thanks in advance for the help,

Timsun

System information:

Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: Macmini6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2,3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total number of Cores: 4
L2-cache (per core): 256 KB
L3-cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB

 

[Altemose]

I am just curious to find out if it's the ssd who slows down after almost 2 years of use or if it is a malfunction. Or if it is mac who's slowing down the drive, and that a fresh setup helps to make it faster.

SSDs degrade in performance if TRIM is not used. If you are using TRIM then verify that it is still enabled. You should try to erase the free space on the SSD. There is some information on TRIM and OS X here.

 

[ColdCase]

How full is the SSD now compared to years ago? A SSD at 70-100% capacity is not going to perform nearly as well as a near empty one.

Then it could be the SSD too, OCZ SSDs are not noted for durability... but they typically just stop working when they fail. If the OCZ SSD has been heavily used (lots of stored then erased data) it will throttle to prevent gate wearout before the warranty is up. But you need to be using it pretty heavy, more than just the OS.

 

[Weaselboy]

Running without TRIM can slow an SSD down over time.

Try turning in TRIM with the TRIM Enabler app. Then hold command-s at boot to boot to single user mode. Now enter "fsck -fy" at the command line (without the quotes) and enter.

You should see a message at the end about tall unused blocks were TRIM'd.

Now type reboot and test you speeds again.

 

[timsun]

Thanks for the advise!

Hey guys,

I installed the TRIM Enabler and did the command thingy and everything suceeded. SSD is around 180 mb/s read and write, I guess i don't have to buy a new ssd after all!

Great community and well explained!

Cheers,

Timsun

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One last thing, I found out you can see how many GB you have written and read in the TRIM program,
i have written 7396 GB and readed 14403 GB. Is that more than average? Or is it normale use? Should i try to use less? I have used it for about 1.5 years.

 

[ColdCase]

Thats very low use. Reads doesn't hurt anything, its the writes that wear the gates but you need to write hundreds of times what you are doing to have any impact.