Beside the boot time (a bit longer), my internal SSD (2015-12 ?) seems to be slow, slow as a snail (3360 x 2100) when I compare to a traditional USB 3 external HS running either El Capitan and macOS Sierra (beta 7, actually running) in standard retina mode (1280 x 800, very small !).
Must I go to my nearest Apple Store with my bill and waranty box ?
install this app : https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx
there is a free 10 days demo
it will tell you if the drive has to be changed or not.
but I’ve never seen a slow ssd… only some ( rare) full dead ssd
there may be some software that eats all the power. look at the activity monitor app to see what’s running.
I agree with Jean-Yves. I also never heard of a SSD is slowing down. Mostly it works or not.
Thank you folks.
S.M.A.R.T. state is ok.
Activity Monitor: nothing strange appears.
Slow SSD: in fact, if I do not installed macos Sierra, I do not noticed how fast Firefox is on it (and so how slow Firefox is on El Capitan / SSD boot disc). Scrolling a page with around 240 color images (1440 x 450~ in a single html file) scroll fast.
I will investigate.
PS: I do not use any migration tool when I installed the OS in that external 1TB boot disk.
The built in SSD is 256GB / 23GB (now, it was more than 50GB yesterday).
With SSD it is very simple. It works or it does not.
It will not slow down because it is at its end of its lifecycle. You start your computer on and voila no SSD in the first seconds of the boot process. Your SSD is dead and can be thrown away.
By the way, I have an (expensive) Intel Speed Demon 240 GB SSD used since 1 november 2012 which is still working without any faults. I am using Windows 7, there are not much laptops which has to suffer so much as this one. It is from 31 January 2009 and still more than fast enough. This laptop has fallen onto a hard floor. In the floor there is a small hole about 4 mm deep, the edge of the laptop is cracked, but everything else works normal including the SSD. Believe me this laptop is used heavily in all kinds of environments. Last month there was only 175 MB free at the system partition.
Something else is making your computer slow, not your SSD. However there are special defragmentation applications like IObit Smart Defrag which makes a difference between a HDD and an SSD. They also have MacBooster (for which I do the Flemish translation) which will boost your Mac. Seems a very good investment to me.
Any SSD going to die, does not give any signals in advance. One time it just dies and does nothing anymore. Nevertheless, last year July, I succeeded in restoring more than 90% data of a dead SSD owned by a friend. But that was more hobby seen the time I needed.
I cannot understand why people panicking so easily about the lifecycle of an SSD. There are backups not, in case something goes wrong? Even great people can sometimes be so small (including myself).
NEVER use defragmentation on a SSD.
Wrong Markus, and again wrong.
You should better have written, “never use a HDD defragmentation program on an SSD”.
The IObit defragmentation program, makes a difference between HDD and SSD.
I never defragged my SSD but in some cases, where there are a lot of files saved and deleted, it can help boost performance.
By the way, when you fully reformat your SSD you are doing in fact something much worse when your theory is correct.
However your thinking is flawed about SSD and your knowledge about the subject seems limited.
Many times I agree with you, but this time I disagree completely.
did you check with drivedx app ? il will tell you many many more informations than only the smart status.
you can detect if there is a problem on the flex cable between the logic board and the drive for example …
MacBooster? There are a LOT of fake five star ratings for it on MacUpdate, and it is quickly getting a worse reputation than the known malware MacKeeper. It doesn’t really seem to do much besides leaving a lot of pesky files all over your system (see http://applehelpwriter.com/2015/11/09/how-to-uninstall-macbooster/). I certainly wouldn’t want my name associated with it.
[quote=285142:@Chris Verberne]Wrong Markus, and again wrong.
You should better have written, “never use a HDD defragmentation program on an SSD”.
The IObit defragmentation program, makes a difference between HDD and SSD.
I never defragged my SSD but in some cases, where there are a lot of files saved and deleted, it can help boost performance.
By the way, when you fully reformat your SSD you are doing in fact something much worse when your theory is correct.
However your thinking is flawed about SSD and your knowledge about the subject seems limited.
Many times I agree with you, but this time I disagree completely.[/quote]
Well, insulting me is not exactly helping your argument.
And maybe the many hours I spend on reseaching Trim and Garbage collection were wasted and didn’t teach me anything.
And maybe the experts at Crucial, SanDisk, Samsung etc who say you should never defragment an SSD have limited knowledge of the subject too. After all, all they do is make the things, so what do they know. One certainly should not listen to experts now, should one?
Markus,
Like my fellow translators, I only translate for IObit, I am not involved/aware of the internal workings of that application. A few months ago they asked if I would translate for MacBooster. I do not even own a Mac so I do these translations on Windows in an application I wrote myself.
Believe me, I do not translate for companies who install/create spam/spyware on peoples computers. I do believe that such applications as MacBooster needs a lot of files to install. I use Revo Uninstaller Pro which finds a lot of files/registry keys after a normal uninstall. It doesn’t mean that the uninstalled applications is spam. It just means that the standard installer didn’t remove these files.
I install IObit Advanced SystemCare on Windows computers/laptop which I have to repair. I never received any complaint about it and when their licence expires, people ask me to renew for them.
It seems today, we are not gonne agree with each other. Nonetheless you are a very nice guy.
What does that even mean???
No.
When you “reformat” an SSD then you do not actually erase data or overwrite them. The blocks are simply marked as available.
Limited knowledge? Isn’t everyone’s knowledge limited???
But thanks for the insult anyway.
One moment. You actually do not know how that app works? And it comes from the same guys who wrote MacBooster??? The same ones who lie through their teeth with fake reviews???
Did you even read the quoted article??? They "need"to install lots of files with different names pretending to be something else because ?
I rest my case.
To get back to the original question: some Samsung SSDs which had a faulty firmware could cause the SSD to slow down. So which SSD and which firmware do you have.
Talking with calm is better, far better.
Telling us why you believe what you believe may be the start of a good discussion (vs this is good / that is better and no explanation). The devil is in the details.
OS X, actually, do a bit of defragmentation at shutdown time. A clue ? Download hundred files (after a boot), in the middle or so of the process, trash (and empty trash) some files.
Press the shift-lock key to highlight its
light,
Shutdown your computer when your browser session is over,
Wait until the screen shut down, then observe the shift key light: it may stay ON for some seconds to far more. During that time, OS X is working and doing defragmentation.
c. Clears (delete) files in a traditional HD will takes a minute (two ?)
Low level format of a traditional hard disk will take hours.
And I do not talked about traditional HD whose speed is 5400t/m or 7200 t/m or even 10000 t/m or faster. The difference is amazing.
Back to my question, and since all operations when I boot from the SSD are slower than when I boot on a traditional external hard disk, I will make some testings when I will have a bit of time.
At first, I was thinking that it was Firefow fault, but since I updated it (download the dmg, move the application folder previous Firefox, copy Firefox into the Application folder from the dmg), it may be its supporting data, but I do not think Firefox is the faultive.
And you know that how??? Does it tell you, or do you simply assume?
From Crucial:
Question
Can defragmenting an SSD just once cause a loss of performance, or is that something that occurs only if done regularly?
Answer
The short answer is this: you don’t have to defrag your SSD.
To understand why, we need to look at the purpose of defragmenting. Defragging ensures that large files are stored in one continuous area of a hard disc driveso that it can be read in one go. Mechanical drives have a relatively long seek time of approximately 15ms, so every time a file is fragmented you lose 15ms finding the next one, And this really adds up when reading lots of different files split into lots of different fragments.
However, this isn’t an issue with SSDs, because the seek time is about 0.1ms. You aren’t really going to notice the benefit of defragged files–which means defragging has no performance advantages with an SSD.
An SSD moves data that’s already happily on your disk to other places on your disk, often sticking it at a temporary position first. Thats’s what gives defragmenting a disadvantage for SSD users You’re writing data you already have, which uses up some of the NAND’s limited rewrite capability, – with no performance advantage to be gained from it.
So basically, don’t defrag your drive because at best it won’t do anything, at worst it does nothing for your performance and you will use up write cycles doing it. Having done it a few times isn’t going to cause you much trouble, but you don’t want this to be a scheduled, weekly type thing.
So unless someone can explain or show to me how access and read/write times on an electronic (not mechanical) device can be improved by moving the data to a different place - where they are accessed at the same speed - ?
I have no idea either what IObit defragmentation program does exactly, and agree that optimizing seek time is futile.
However, if you take the word defragmentation literally, one could imagine a program that simply insures all sectors of a file be contiguous. Which, again, looks pretty futile, in a memory accessed randomly.
Doing a low level format is even worse for an SSD than defragmenting it, because every bit of the SSD will be written on.
Opinions about defragmenting an SSD differs greatly, it just depend on the situation. In my case, when my SSD was less then 200 MB free, it can give you free space again. On this moment my SSD is used for a little over 52000 hours and it has no faults. An SSD can be written a few 1000 times at the same place again before that place gets worn out.
But what I also experience over time is a slow down, just like you do. As a rule of thumb, every 10 months I do a complete new installation of the Windows software (remember I am on Windows), which prevent for me the slow down.
Depending on the use of your computer, you will experience a slow down which is not your SSD but the applications and utilities installed and running on your computer. Maybe disconnecting your computer from the internet, switch of Anti-virus and anti spy/malware applications and then see again.
You are mentioning Firefox slowing down. Since I think something less than two months ago, I also am not so satisfied with Firefox anymore because it is slowing down too. Nevertheless I found out that my computer/firefox is infected with a very nasty malware which is blocked by MalwareBytes. Every time I visit another website or page, that malware becomes active and I get a message from MalwareBytes it is blocked. It tries to call home to an external website to send the information it logged on my computer. Sometimes the keyboard is very unresponsive, also when no browser is open. I tried everything, followed a lot of procedures to remove it, however everything failed. It seems to me I have to reformat my SSD again and install a new Windows OS.
@Markus Winter
As a translator, I do not have to know the internal workings of the applications I translate. I just receive an .lng file which I use for the translation. What use would it be for me, to know the inner workings of the applications I translate. we are a virtual assistance business which finish the projects we receive mostly within a very tight deadline. Many times we work with 3 or 4 people on the same project, without really knowing each other. On the higher level, there is a secretary (believe me she is very much multi-tasking/skilled and bossy) which does the management, administration, keep track of the timelines, divide the workload and overview the projects/people working on them. We receive the wishes/specs of our clients and all people involved do their job in conjunction with the others. At the final stage, everything is combined in the project, final checked and send to the client. That is how we work. I did not want to insult you Markus, just shared my opinion and impressions. Who am I to judge about your skills? Despite the fact, I believe our personalities and professional skills match each other to work succesfully together, we hardly know each other so it is hard to judge each other. Anyway I do not judge anybody, I just don’t like it. You are a friendly, very helpfull person with a strong temperament which surface from the moment somebody disagrees with you. Your positive gifts far outweight your strong temperament which makes you the man you are which is good. Can we now go back to the subject of the OP?
Maybe your computer is infected with the same malware? I cannot tell what to do on Mac but I am afraid to get completely rid if it is the same malware, you have to do a clean install. At my place with Windows, everything I tried failed and believe me, it is a lot. Normally, I can remove spy/malware/ virusses without any problems. Regretfully, this malware seems to beat me or I get lost somewhere.
The malware which is blocked at my laptop is :
WARNING : FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY DO NOT CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK,
OR YOU ARE RISKING TO BE INFECTED ALSO!!!
f.asdfzxcv1312.com
IP : 198.7.58.86
Port : 12613
Type : outbound
Process : C:\Stargate\Firefox\App\Firefox.exe
If I would not have installed MalwareBytes, I would not even know that this virus is present. Still, even Malwarebytes does not succeed in removing it. I have no idea how I got this malware.
Did you try Garbage collection on your SSD? This can give your SSD better performance, better than defrag. In Windows 7, get a utility which issues a Trim command or copy your data and then do a secured erase, after that then you copy your data back.
Hope this helps.
Chris
I have to agree with Markus - never defragment your SSD. And I mean defragment in the actual meaning of the word - no confusion no different meaning. If someone choose to use defragment to mean TRIM then they are confusing people and potentially misleading them to kill their SSD.
SSD has limited number of writes . When you defrag, your shift (meaning write) all the parts of files around into many temp locations again and again before they are written into their final location. This use up lot of the write limits causing the SSD to die prematurely. The more frequent your defrag, the faster the SSD use up their write limits, the faster they die.
Here is a link to a simple explanantion, better than I can:
http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/
Also, what is TRIM?
http://www.howtogeek.com/222077/how-to-enable-trim-for-third-party-ssds-on-mac-os-x/