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Resolved SSD upgrade, now frequent "beachballing" - MacBook Pro Mid 2010

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barcode00

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 25, 2010
86
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I recently upgraded the HDD in my MacBook Pro Mid 2010 to a 250GB SSD (Crucial).

I installed Yosemite as new, and installed and activated Trim Enabler (Cindori). Trim Support shows as "Yes" under the System Report, and the negotiated link speed is 3 Gigabit.

Since this time, I have noticed that after a number of days usage, individual applications will become sluggish and will beachball at upon each click request. When this happens, usually other applications will work without problems if I were to switch to them.

Booting into Single User mode and running "fsck -ffy" seems to resolve the problem, though I seem to have to run that command more than once in order to see the problem resolve. (i.e. if I ran the command once and exited/booted, the application that had been beachballing would continue to do so until I ran the command a further few times.)

If there are any comments, they would be welcome, thanks.
 
What was status of SSD before install? Did you get it used?

I suspect it was 'zero'ed.

Not good for SSDs (but okay to do with rpm drives if I remember correctly).

Also: not sure what Crucial SSD you have. Maybe, check if it has native Garbage Collection? Then, Trim won't be necessary. Maybe even cause more problems.

Anyway, I read some discussions and articles about SSDs a time ago, on Anandtech and these forums about GC, Trim, Zeroing, proper way to "reset" a SSD.

Zero'ed. Don't remember if there is fix. Just time and lots of writing???

 
Suggestion:

UNinstall TRIM enabler.

Run this way for 4-5 days.

Still getting beachballs?
 
It might be a cable problem. Units made before 2013 seemed to be particularly susceptible to it.

SCSC just updated their article on HDD and SSD problems. You can find it by going to the how-to section of their site and clicking on the article about hard drive and SSD problems. The site's at http://scsc-online.com if you want to view it.

I thought Cindori was blocked because of a kext problem on SSDs? Did you check their site for info?
 
I had no issues installing a Crucial MX100 onto my Mid 2010 MBP 2.66/4/256SSD. I did not enable any trim support or download anything and it worked great.
 
The reason I'm thinking a possible cable problem is because he needs to keep using fsck to repair the file system. That's not uncommon with a bad cable unless he just had bad luck and got a lemon SSD.
 
I use a Crucial M4 on my 2010 that is running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and I have TRIM enabled. However, that is an older SSD and older OS version, and newer SSDs in more modern releases and revisions of OS X should not need the help of software enablers. It's part of their firmware now, and the OS has better support as a whole.

I therefore second (or third?) disabling TRIM and seeing how it runs, otherwise you may have to update the firmware on the drive or try swapping it for a different one.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks for the replies - some more information on this...

The SSD was purchased as new, however for the first 6 weeks or so, I was using and booting from it using a USB enclosure because I'd previously had problems with a damaged HDD and/or ribbon cable. (This is what led me to consider purchasing the SSD.)

I must have bought five replacement HD cables to try with the SSD because each was failing to recognise the new SSD drive. (In the interim, I continued to use the SSD over USB.) Eventually, I managed to find a cable that did work internally with the SSD.

In the time I was using the SSD over USB, I had to follow the same procedure of frequently "fsck"-ing because of the same problems I am describing above -- I did this roughly weekly. This almost always fixed my problems for another week or so. I did not use, or attempt to enable, any TRIM support application in this time (because I'd read it wasn't supported over USB, or something).

So, to clarify: the SSD is presently housed in my MacBook Pro with the replacement cable I eventually found to work. One of the first things I did when I found a cable that worked was enable Trim support (I've since disabled it and re-enabled kext.)

I am managing to post this using Firefox, but any other applcation crawls and has to catch up with itself.

Lastly, Yosemite was installed over USB on the SSD.
 
I hate to sound like "Yosemite Cynic" but did you try it with another OS? It seems to be very picky about it's hardware.

Some other things to try:

1. Read the link ZVH posted in his first post above. High level, symptom driven article with several parts. Look at the sections on drive and system problems.

2. Put the HDD in an external enclosure and test it on another system to see if it's really bad. Like the link in the ZVH post indicates a lot of different problems manifest themselves with similar symptoms.

You won't like this comment, but the problems you're having sound more like a logic board problem that's acting like a hard drive problem than a real hard drive problem. You should not need to be using fsck to repair the file system all the time. I also don't get the stuff about all the bad cables. The other problem might be Yosemite just doesn't like the SSD for some reason. Lastly, maybe you have the worst luck on Earth and the SSD itself is bad. I think someone posted on here some time ago that their SSD was "dropping blocks" and eventually the SSD got RMA'd.

Personally I doubt Yosemite is to blame, but it is a possibility.
 
Last edited:
I have another update to this.

I've noticed a connection between my system becoming unresponsive/sluggish and Safari being open.

When Safari is open, the application itself is slow, in addition to some other applications such as Finder and System Preferences. In 'Console', the following same three cluster of entries are created every ten seconds.

23/06/2015 16:49:26.036 cfprefsd[533]: Property list invalid for format: 200 (property list dictionaries may only have keys which are CFStrings, not 'CFData')
23/06/2015 16:49:26.608 ReportCrash[523]: Saved crash report for cfprefsd[533] version 1153.18 to /Users/user/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/cfprefsd_2015-06-23-164926_MacBook-Pro.crash
23/06/2015 16:49:26.612 ReportCrash[523]: Removing excessive log: file:///Users/user/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/cfprefsd_2015-06-23-161733_MacBook-Pro.crash

These entries are not generated when Safari is closed/quitted.

I realised this may be a symptom of the causes described earlier in this thread, but it's interesting to have found a connection.
 
I have another update which follows on from the post above.

I hadn't been able to use Safari, and instead I have been using an alternative browser. Each time Safari was started, it produced the same series of console messages (above) and caused the system to slow, Safari became almost unusable, etc.

I followed the steps from here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/144311/reset-safari-from-command-line/164645#164645. I am now able to use Safari without any problems.

It's possible these problems will return, but I shall keep the thread updated.

(I have Trim support disabled still, by the way.)
 
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