OK, I may as well try these suggestions.
No, thus far I have gotten no further than the freeDOS prompt'
chmod
----------
Thanks, this is certainly worth a try. I waited half a minute or so, and the drive is silent, not seeking, etc,
chmod
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
The Samsung 840/840 Pro SSD thread
- Thread starter Hexley
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
OK, I may as well try these suggestions.
No, thus far I have gotten no further than the freeDOS prompt'
chmod
----------
Thanks, this is certainly worth a try. I waited half a minute or so, and the drive is silent, not seeking, etc,
chmod
Hi all, i've read through this thread and aren't really sure of the answers to a couple of questions so hopefully someone will be able to give me a simple answer...
The HDD on my 2010 i3 iMac is on its way out so I am going to install an SSD in the optical bay
The only things on my HDD are programs and their associated libraries...all data (photos, media etc is on external drives)
I am looking at the Samsung 840 but unsure as to which will perform best given my imac is SATA2 limited
120GB 840 - Read 530/Write 130 £80
128GB 840 Pro - Read 530/Write 390 £110
250GB 840 - Read 540/Write 250 £130
My main question is will I achieve any of these advertised speeds with my SATA2 connection? If not how close will it be?
Will I actually see any benefits of teh pro on my system?
I will only be using the drive for the OS and applications and am really after a snappier feel to the system
My thoughts are that the 250GB drive will offer the best balance of speed/price/performance
The HDD on my 2010 i3 iMac is on its way out so I am going to install an SSD in the optical bay
The only things on my HDD are programs and their associated libraries...all data (photos, media etc is on external drives)
I am looking at the Samsung 840 but unsure as to which will perform best given my imac is SATA2 limited
120GB 840 - Read 530/Write 130 £80
128GB 840 Pro - Read 530/Write 390 £110
250GB 840 - Read 540/Write 250 £130
My main question is will I achieve any of these advertised speeds with my SATA2 connection? If not how close will it be?
Will I actually see any benefits of teh pro on my system?
I will only be using the drive for the OS and applications and am really after a snappier feel to the system
My thoughts are that the 250GB drive will offer the best balance of speed/price/performance
No you won't see those speeds on your iMac because of the SATA II. Rather you'll see about half that, which is still going to be dramatically better than the hard drive speed.
Unless you plan on a lot of write activity on the SSD, and I mean a lot, the non-pro version of the 840 should be sufficient.
I have a SATA III MBP with the 830 and it boots in 15 seconds to a usable desktop. My 2010 iMac has SATA II with the 840 and it boots in 23 seconds.
Cool, thanks for the help
Would i see a performance benefit with the larger capacity 840 with it's higher advertised speeds?
Space isn't really an issue
Probably not. Again, you're limited to the SATA II speeds of 3Gbps and the 840 is capable of 6Gbps. So though one SSD in the 840 series claims to be faster than it's sister drive, you wouldn't notice it in your particular machine.
Thanks, I've just checked and my current drive gets stats of 95/75 on blackmagic when the system idles but drops to half that when doing other things aswell
I just wanted to check as the speeds of the 120GB 840 seem close to these readings for write speeds or is an ssd less affected by other processes?
It would probably be a good idea to read this very good article review on the 840 series on Anandtech.com. Be sure to check the drop-down menu at the end of the article page to keep reading.
It's not the sequential speeds that matter, but the small random IOs and latencies. HDs can barely provide 1MB/s 4KB random read/write speeds, whereas even the SSD 840 offers up to 250MB/s (depends on the IO size and queue depth, but even in the worst case scenarios SSD 840 should be tens of times faster). Combine that with much lower latency (HD latency is measured in milliseconds, whereas SSD latency is in microseconds) and the overall performance is much, much better.
Yes, reading reviews of SSDs, especially on anandtech.com, taught me that small file-size, random performance is the bottleneck for ordinary, everyday use scenarios, not the sequential performance.
But is is the sequential performance measured by the Blackmagic tool that are usually posted on this forum. So to mix things up, below is the report of 4K random writes, followed by 4K random reads, from digilloyd's Disk Tester "IOPS random I/O operations" test for my 840 Pro 512 Gb, about a month old, with latest firmware, with an additional 10 Gb or so of over-provisioning and connected by SATA III in an early-2011 Macbook Pro. Note that the average throughput is 10 Mb/sec write, 8.5 Mb/sec read, in contrast to the ~500 Mb/sec sequential numbers that show up in the Blackmagic tool.
Why do the write speeds fall? Is it because of the on-disk cache? The report says the "File system unified buffer cache" is disabled, but I am not sure whether that includes the RAM cache located in the SSD itself.
I'd love to see some other participants post their results for this or similar tests. Hellhammer, do these results look about right to you?
DiskTester 2.2 64-bit, diglloydTools 2.2.0, 2012-12-15 18:05
OS X 10.6.8, 8 CPU cores, 8192MB memory
Friday, March 1, 2013 2:02:23 PM MT
disktester iops FM_Boot
Capacity GB: 466.07
Free space GB: 261.29
File system signature and id : H+ / HFS Plus
Simultaneous I/O threads: 1
Transfer size per I/O: 4K
Number of transfers (per thread): 131072
Aggregate I/O size: 512MB
File system unified buffer cache: DISABLED (default)
Test type: RANDOM
Write 512MB in seconds: 51.3
Read 512MB in seconds: 60.5
Aggregate write rate MB/sec: 10.0
Aggregate read rate MB/sec: 8.5
Write ops/sec: 2553
Read ops/sec: 2166
Command "iops" executed in 114.07 seconds on Friday, March 1, 2013 2:04:17 PM MT
OS X 10.6.8, 8 CPU cores, 8192MB memory
Friday, March 1, 2013 2:02:23 PM MT
disktester iops FM_Boot
Capacity GB: 466.07
Free space GB: 261.29
File system signature and id : H+ / HFS Plus
Simultaneous I/O threads: 1
Transfer size per I/O: 4K
Number of transfers (per thread): 131072
Aggregate I/O size: 512MB
File system unified buffer cache: DISABLED (default)
Test type: RANDOM
Code:
Writing ...
MB Write MB/sec Write ops/sec
65 32.8 8404.6
97 24.4 6234.0
123 20.6 5274.7
146 18.3 4681.6
166 16.7 4276.3
186 15.5 3979.2
205 14.7 3750.5
223 14.0 3571.4
240 13.4 3424.0
257 12.9 3299.9
274 12.5 3195.6
290 12.1 3104.5
307 11.8 3024.4
323 11.5 2954.5
339 11.3 2895.4
355 11.1 2841.0
371 10.9 2795.4
387 10.8 2752.9
403 10.6 2715.6
418 10.5 2680.7
434 10.4 2651.0
450 10.2 2622.6
467 10.2 2600.5
483 10.1 2581.4
500 10.0 2563.5
512 10.0 2552.6
Reading ...
MB Read MB/sec Read ops/sec
16 8.5 2169.6
33 8.4 2147.8
50 8.4 2158.2
67 8.4 2158.9
84 8.4 2157.7
101 8.5 2163.8
118 8.5 2166.6
135 8.5 2168.6
152 8.5 2169.6
169 8.5 2167.3
186 8.5 2167.0
202 8.5 2166.0
219 8.5 2166.3
236 8.5 2166.5
253 8.5 2167.0
270 8.5 2168.8
287 8.5 2168.7
304 8.5 2166.7
321 8.5 2166.0
338 8.5 2165.9
354 8.5 2165.2
371 8.5 2166.3
388 8.5 2165.4
405 8.5 2165.2
422 8.5 2164.4
439 8.5 2164.7
456 8.5 2165.6
473 8.5 2165.7
490 8.5 2165.8
507 8.5 2166.4
512 8.5 2165.7Read 512MB in seconds: 60.5
Aggregate write rate MB/sec: 10.0
Aggregate read rate MB/sec: 8.5
Write ops/sec: 2553
Read ops/sec: 2166
Command "iops" executed in 114.07 seconds on Friday, March 1, 2013 2:04:17 PM MT
Last edited:
more details, and insight is appreciated
My MBP is early 2011 vintage, with an 840 Pro installed, and the stock Apple 256 moved to the optic bay. The SuperDrive is used via USB dongle. Prior to this upgrade/install faux pas I had no issues with the configuration. I use the SuperDrive as needed, with no intervention.
* VMWare fusion will not update the firmware. The Utility launches, but then it claims it cannot find a supported drive. I'm not surprised but I wanted to make sure.
* My MBP will not allow me to update the 840 firmware using the Samsung bootable .iso - I get a black screen and the words freeDOS and that's the end of the line. I have tried this with multiple .iso images, and have cleaned the drive as suggested.
* In an attempt to install BootCamp, and finesse the firmware update via Windows generically, with a fully bootable Windows 7 .iso DVD (boots on any Windows machine and I previously used the same .iso to install Win 7 onto this MBP for use with VMWare Fusion - and that works fine - but at that time I used the SuperDrive BUILT-IN...)...when I get to the point of installing Windows I get the same (see above) black screen with a blinking cursor - DOS foo - and that's the end of THAT line. The optical spins down and my machine fans rev up in some death throes.
Question: kinda seems like the use of the SuperDrive via USB is the wild card.
* Have any of you successfully upgraded the firmware with the SuperDrive when connected externally via USB?
* Have any of you successfully installed BootCamp using the SuperDrive when connected externally via USB?
I am in the weeds on this one. Seems like way overkill to reinstall the SuperDrive internally. But I might need to?
thanks.
chmod
My MBP is early 2011 vintage, with an 840 Pro installed, and the stock Apple 256 moved to the optic bay. The SuperDrive is used via USB dongle. Prior to this upgrade/install faux pas I had no issues with the configuration. I use the SuperDrive as needed, with no intervention.
* VMWare fusion will not update the firmware. The Utility launches, but then it claims it cannot find a supported drive. I'm not surprised but I wanted to make sure.
* My MBP will not allow me to update the 840 firmware using the Samsung bootable .iso - I get a black screen and the words freeDOS and that's the end of the line. I have tried this with multiple .iso images, and have cleaned the drive as suggested.
* In an attempt to install BootCamp, and finesse the firmware update via Windows generically, with a fully bootable Windows 7 .iso DVD (boots on any Windows machine and I previously used the same .iso to install Win 7 onto this MBP for use with VMWare Fusion - and that works fine - but at that time I used the SuperDrive BUILT-IN...)...when I get to the point of installing Windows I get the same (see above) black screen with a blinking cursor - DOS foo - and that's the end of THAT line. The optical spins down and my machine fans rev up in some death throes.
Question: kinda seems like the use of the SuperDrive via USB is the wild card.
* Have any of you successfully upgraded the firmware with the SuperDrive when connected externally via USB?
* Have any of you successfully installed BootCamp using the SuperDrive when connected externally via USB?
I am in the weeds on this one. Seems like way overkill to reinstall the SuperDrive internally. But I might need to?
thanks.
chmod
I just bought both the 840 and 840 Pro and about to install them. Do we have to update the firmware its dated in December. I would think these are up to date. Im about ready to install both of them on my MBP.
That is what I would suggest you try as it's what I would do if in your situation. As you said, that seems to be the only wildcard. Pain in the butt I know, but you should try it.
Once you get it installed and OS X on it, check to see what version is already on it. If it's outdated, here is the link to the OS X firmware page for the 840 & 840 Pro SSD's.
When using full LBA space, random write speed always drops. Especially when there's already some data in the drive, the drive must do garbage collection on the fly to ensure a pool of empty blocks and that has a negative impact on performance. If you run it long enough, you end up in read-modify-write situation where performance can be pretty terrible.
They don't look that off to me. However, try testing with higher QDs (i.e. Simultaneous I/O threads), try for example 3 and 32 (those are what we use for random write testing).
You could try burning the ISO to USB using Windows
http://www.isotousb.com/
It's IOPS which really matter (much more than Read/writes), & which are not easy to measure either. The speed increase & computing experience that will result will be a revelation, trust me
It's IOPS which really matter (much more than Read/writes), & which are not easy to measure either. The speed increase & computing experience that will result will be a revelation, trust me
Cool, Thanks, i'm gonna forget about the 120GB standard as once it's formatted etc it won't be that spacious and i'd rather have a faster drive for the future
I'm gonna go buy either the 128GB Pro (110) or the 250GB Standard (£130) tomorrow
If I went for the larger drive then I could also store my music on it.....or is it advisable to leave it on the internal HDD/external drive that's already there?
I suppose that 128GB should suffice as that's what they include in the fusion drive for apps etc
For 20 quids more, get the 250GB. You can never have too much space and you shouldn't fill the SSD to the top (based on our own tests, having ~25% free space is optimal from a performance standpoint).
I had the same experience with Parallels.
From your post, I'd suggest forgetting about the firmware upgrade for now. Hellhammer has related that a Mac updater is forthcoming from Samsung; in the meantime, if you have the DXM03B0Q firmware, it is working just fine. I think the DXM04B0Q firmware is only a minor tweak for "edge cases". FWIW, I did some performance testing before and after applying DXM04B0Q, and saw absolutely zero difference between them.
That's because the virtualized OS doesn't have direct access to the HBA layer, which is required to update the firmware.
The latest update just fixes a bug that prevented the SSD from doing idle garbage collection on some laptops. Basically, the SSD entered such a low power state that GC couldn't be done, which resulted in degraded performance in some cases. However, I don't think OS X even supports HIPM/DIPM ATA features that enable the lowest power states, so there is nothing to worry about.
^^ I'm glad you got it working. I didn't know earlier that you were trying to update it from an external drive.
Likewise, I would have also taken the time to put the SuperDrive back in, update the firmware and then take it back out replacing the secondary SSD.
Likewise, I would have also taken the time to put the SuperDrive back in, update the firmware and then take it back out replacing the secondary SSD.
Go to the
icon in the upper left of your screen, then choose About this Mac, then System Report, then in the left-hand column, select Serial-ATA and you can find the firmware version under 'Revision'.
Go to the
Image
Thanks, I looked at that too and I didnt think it was the firmware. Looks like I am behind
.DXT06B0Q
Is it worth the hassle of upgrading, the newest firmware release notes just say:
Fixed minor bugs while improving sustained performance.
^^ I'm glad you got it working. I didn't know earlier that you were trying to update it from an external drive.
Likewise, I would have also taken the time to put the SuperDrive back in, update the firmware and then take it back out replacing the secondary SSD.
surely there is a hack to do this from a mounted optical drive??