SSD gone bad, slow, irresponsive and freezing MBP

[prometheus44]

Hey all,

Back in September I installed a 120gb OWC SSD in the optibay, and a larger HDD in the regular bay.
The setup worked great until recently, when my new MBP 13" i7 started freezing completely sometimes twice a day under regular use. All my apps just started bouncing and bouncing, taking up to a few seconds to launch while they used to open virtually instantly.

So yesterday I downloaded Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the app store in order to actually see what was going on, performance wise.
The writing speed I got was around 90mbps, while the reading speed was barely more than 150mbs.
And it doesn't sound right to me.

(the HDD got speeds of around 40 and 40 r/w)

Any idea of what might be going on? A bad file somewhere? Is that just how SSDs are supposed to evolve, even under casual use?

 

[Hellhammer]

How full is the SSD? The speeds are nowhere near normal, but Blackmagic is known to be fairly unreliable.

 

[prometheus44]

There's 1/4 left (30gb), I've cleaned the cache, emptied trash, and everything's up to date.

However unreliable it may be, the fact is that it's become noticeably slower... Not to mention the fact that it randomly freezes. It did yesterday: I only had Reeder, Sparrow and iTunes running. It froze when I tried to launch iCal (or some other benign app!)

Could it be a bad egg, or that I did something wrong. Or could it be RAM??? (8GB from OWC also)

I wanted to run Apple Hardware test, but apparently Lion doesn't support it anymore...

 

[Ice Dragon]

OWC doesn't make the RAM, though having such little space hurts as well as the fact that OWC uses Sandforce.

 

[prometheus44]

I don't get how having 1/4th left is considered "little space"...
Would anyone else have any idea as to how it could have become as slow as a regular HDD? Just ran a speed test again. Down to Read 77mbs Write 177mbs...
That's an SSD 6G Pro from OWC... Claimed speed are in the 300's

 

[shortcut3d]

Try moving the SSD to the regular bay. For some reason there have been problems with SSDs in the optibay.

 

[Ant.honey]

There are no/have not been problems with the 13" with the SSD in the optical bay.

 

[prometheus44]

No need to move it then?

So I should just wipe it out and start over? Doesn't sound right after only 3 months of regular use...

 

[jon08]

Try to run Rember memtest just to be on the safe side about your RAM, but yeah, if I were you I'd rather have my SSD in the main bay, as opposed to the optibay.