Some quick SSD Advice? My boot drive died!

[HCMarkus]

If you are concerned about SSD life, take a look here:

http://techreport.com/review/27062/the- ... fter-1-5pb

Our SSD Endurance Experiment has claimed many victims since it began over a year ago. We're not done yet, but we've already learned some valuable lessons. For example, modern SSDs appear to have more than enough endurance for typical client workloads. All six of our subjects wrote hundreds of terabytes without issue, which is far more data than even most power users will need to write during the useful lives of their drives.

Every drive tested made it to over 700 Terabytes of writes. Several still live after 1.5 PETRAbytes of writes.

[mikehalloran]

I noticed how well the 840 Pro is doing in those tests. The EVO is the next generation.

Since Samsung has announced a firmware update for 10/15, I will hold off installing my new 845 EVO till I see what's involved. I hope that I won't have to install it in a Windows machine to update.

[supersonic]

I use the mx100s with no problems so far.

[HCMarkus]

Only Samsung TLC-based SSDs are known to have this issue. The general consensus appears to be the TLC NAND in Samsung EVO drives needs forced refreshing more often than the current firmware provides; many have noted that by re-writing old data on their EVO drives, read speed is restored. To my knowledge, no one has reported data loss.

As noted a few posts back, Samsung has promised a firmware patch that will address the issue for the 840 EVO, to be delivered October 15.

I also posted a link to a very cool SSD endurance study a couple of post back; for those who are afraid to go SSD, I encourage you to review.

[HCMarkus]

Here's info on the firmware patch Samsung has released for their EVO drives:

http://techreport.com/review/27212/sams ... h-old-data

Note that the patch is for Wondows only, but a version for Mac users is supposed o be released by month's end.

[James Steele]

What's most exciting about that to me, is that as long as there's 10% free space on the drive, the update does not affect data on the drive and you don't need to reformat, etc.

[tremo]

I just wanted to report that the "Performance Restoration" update for Samsung 840 EVO SSDs is now available for Macs. I have 840 EVOs in both my Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro. Just ran it on the MBP (NOT my main system!), and it went smoothly. Very noticeable performance increase. I ran the update using the .iso burned to a CDR (see below).

https://www.samsung.com/global/business ... 3-11000170

This post was VERY helpful:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5132196

"Creating bootable DVDs from .iso by converting to .cdr first" -- I never would've known to do that!

I'll do the Mac Pro later tonight (after a full backup of course!)

[James Steele]

I just wanted to report that the "Performance Restoration" update for Samsung 840 EVO SSDs is now available for Macs.

Thanks for the heads up!!

[James Steele]

I just wanted to report that the "Performance Restoration" update for Samsung 840 EVO SSDs is now available for Macs. I have 840 EVOs in both my Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro. Just ran it on the MBP (NOT my main system!), and it went smoothly. Very noticeable performance increase. I ran the update using the .iso burned to a CDR (see below).

https://www.samsung.com/global/business ... 3-11000170

This post was VERY helpful:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5132196

"Creating bootable DVDs from .iso by converting to .cdr first" -- I never would've known to do that!

I'll do the Mac Pro later tonight (after a full backup of course!)

So even though it boots DOS and you run it, it is "in theory" non-destructive to the data on the drive? I'm going to start a backup now, but that has me nervous.

[James Steele]

Okay... just did it on my studio MacPro and no problems. I did do a full backup to be on the safe side, but it turned out well.

[HCMarkus]

Okay... just did it on my studio MacPro and no problems. I did do a full backup to be on the safe side, but it turned out well.

Great!

[tremo]

So even though it boots DOS and you run it, it is "in theory" non-destructive to the data on the drive? I'm going to start a backup now, but that has me nervous.

Yeah, to play it safe I ran it on my non-mission-critical MBP first, then last night I did the Mac Pro. No problems either time.

Gotta hand it to Samsung, they responded to the problem and delivered effective solutions when promised.

One thing I'm not sure about: do you need to have a minimum amount of free space available on the SSD to run the fix? When this issue first came up, weeks ago, I looked at a lot of discussions, and I *think* I recall someone saying that if free space was tight, the procedure might not work. There's nothing about this in the documentation from Samsung.

On my MBP, the 500GB SSD is only about 1/4 full, and on my Mac Pro, the 250GB SSD is a little over half full, so I wouldn't have expected to encounter any space-related problems.

[James Steele]

I seem to recall reading that you had to have at least 10% free space in the drive to run the updater.

[mikehalloran]

Samsung did announce that you needed 10% free but I'm not finding that now.

[Phil O]

OK, so please forgive my ignorance on this topic, but with all this testing in mind what should I expect the life span of an SSD to be if I use it as my boot drive. Doesn't OSX constantly read and write to the boot drive for it's virtual memory stuff (or what ever it's called now)? Are we talking longer or shorter than a typical HD? Most of what I read talks terabytes but then fails to give similar data for HDs.

Phil