Signs of impending SSD failure?

[mhschmieder]

For the past week, my computer has thrown me the spinning ball on first attempt at power up, every time. I've had to do a hard reset, and the second time has worked.

Today, I got quite a scare, because after four tries it still wouldn't power up.

So, I unplugged my audio interface, all my USB license dongles, and my bluetooth mouse, and it powered up.

I ran "Repair Disk" on the SSD (which is in the second media tray) and no errors were found.

After that, I ran "Repair Disk Permissions" yet again, and there was one additional directory (the AU directory, but my most recent plug-in update was a week earlier) vs. the usual suspects.

I've been putting off a new SSD until I wrap up an album project for a local band, to reduce risk, but my day job, gigs, and interleaved recording project work have dragged that out longer than I expected. I am very close to being finished now, so still think it would be better to wait (probably meaning 2-3 weeks max).

Have other people experienced this? I know SSD's are said to fail suddenly and catastrophically when they do, and in a non-recoverable manner. Does it seem likely these are symptoms of impending SSD failure and/or does it seem that doing the new SSD now is lower risk than waiting for completion of a project?

[mikehalloran]

Not enough information. Knowing that it's an SSD in your Mac Pro isn't enough.

Do you have Trim enabled? Is it enabled on whatever drive you used to check it in Disk Utility.

[mhschmieder]

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Media, SATA, 120 GB, one partition as boot drive in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

At the time I set this up in the second media tray slot when I bought this Late 2010 MacPro, I didn't know Trim could be used on such a drive/slot combination.

[mikehalloran]

You have to enable Trim on your boot drive. It can be an SSD or HD. When you run Repair Disk from Disk Utility, it will Trim the SSD as long as there's enough space on the drive for that to work. Run it on the drive, not the named partition.

[HCMarkus]

The fact you successfully booted with USB devices disconnected could suggest the USB devices are drawing too much power from the native ports. I had a similar issue for a while, where my MP would not post. When I removed a few USB devices, all was well.

[mhschmieder]

Yeah I think that happened on my old computer a bit too now and then.

What's really strange though is that sometimes the computer won't start if the wireless mouse power is less than nominal, even if it hasn't yet sent up an alert that power is starting to fade (it takes awhile before it really requires recharging).

I think the mouse was likely the bigger issue, as that has also happened on my identical MacPro at work which is running Yosemite but doesn't have an SSD as they buy everything stock at work.

I definitely don't have enough free disc space to enable Trim at this point, but will certainly do so on my next drive.

[darrell]

Possibly related question? I just put a second SSD drive into my early 2008 mac pro, and on startups the little light above the on/off button flashes, and nothing else happens. When I turn the unit off (holding start button) and restart, it comes up as usual. Is this a sign of something ugly? (hope I'm not off-topic-ing the thread!)

[mikehalloran]

Possibly related question? I just put a second SSD drive into my early 2008 mac pro, and on startups the little light above the on/off button flashes, and nothing else happens. When I turn the unit off (holding start button) and restart, it comes up as usual. Is this a sign of something ugly? (hope I'm not off-topic-ing the thread!)

Probably not ugly but you've given no information that can help identify the problem.

I could list 20 or more possibilities.

I'll start with the basics. Do you have operating systems on both drives? Did you create one volume by cloning from another?

Have you selected a boot drive before shutting down? Have you tried booting in Safe Mode by holding the Shift key on startup? Have you run Repair Disk from Apple's Disk Utility?

[mhschmieder]

It's amazing how little prices have come down in three years time (10% at most).

Anyway, I went ahead and ordered the 480 GB PCIe SSD from OWC tonight.

I think that gives enough free space for safe long-term use, best performance, and the inevitable growth of data as apps keep getting bigger.

Not sure yet whether I'll push some things back to the system drive that haven't been happy on updates. For one thing, I forget which ones those are (Alchemy, for me, has not been one of the problematic ones).

I may use the media drive SSD (120 GB) to host a frequently-used VI or two that total about 80 GB or so. Not sure yet which one, but not Vienna Imperial as I rarely use it.

[mhschmieder]

Right on cue, my SSD failed just as I was installing the new 480 GB PCIe SSD, so I had to use recovery mode via Time Machine to reinstall Mavericks on the new SSD (it wouldn't let me use Yosemite) and then recover my last known working state from Sunday.

The SSD nominally still works, but has a lot of corrupted files. I made the PCIe SSD my new Boot Drive and all is well except for having had to re-authorize DP 8, and the weird Steven Slate FG-X problem that I reported in the main forum as it might be affecting other people (I don't yet understand the cause of the problem, but it prevents all programs that are based on Plogue and/or ARIA, such as Finale and StudioOne, from launching).

[mhschmieder]

BTW, in spite of Mike Halloran's advice (yet after almost an hour of fretting over this decision before finalizing it), I ended up NOT enabling Trim, as OWC updated their site a few weeks ago to say it is still better not to do so for their drives.

I was confused over whether the two separate blades meant RAID-1 is possible, but a co-worker said the PCIe bus architecture doesn't support that unless separate slots. Digilloyd's advice was confusing, as was Apple's descriptions in their setup choices. It does seem you need two PCIe SSD cards in order tot ale advantage of RAID-1 though.