Samsung 840pro poor performance [RESOLVED]

[Digiuser]

I have had 5 Samsung 840pro SSD's [512GB] for about 18 months. 4 of them are for streaming samples and are working great. The other two drives are for recording.
The recording drives worked well for about a year. Then the Write speed dropped to about 80MB/s. Clicks and Pops followed.
Samsung replaced the drives on separate occasions with refurb's. I benchmarked the empty, formatted refurb disk and got the blazing fast performance numbers I would expect. Then, As soon as I recopied my 240GB of data back to the new formatted drive [filling it about half way] the performance fell off to that lousy 80 MB/s write reading. I called Samsung and as soon as the technician realized I was using the drive in an external Drive array connected via thunderbolt, [pegasus J4] he said that was not a supported usage. Any future RMA's will not be honored unless I can show that I tried the drive in an internal usage and get sub-par performance. I have a late 2013 Mac Pro so that won't be happening.

I'm going to give the OWC OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G a try.
See if it performs adequately and keeps a high performance reading even after my data is on the drive. Pretty bummed though since I did a ton of research on the Samsung's....

Anybody else experience anything like this?

[mikehalloran]

TRIM cannot run except over SATA, eSATA or PCIe. This is why Samsung can't support their use over Thunderbolt. There are rumors that TRIM works over TB if there's a PCIe chassis on the other end. I have not been able to confirm true/false.

I do not find any SSD arrays over TB in the Apple Store. This may be why. Hard Drive RAID assemblies are quite fast.

Angelbird in Germany has SSDs that supposedly support TRIM over USB 3 using their proprietary drivers. I have no idea if Mac OS is supported. There are a number of US resellers including B&H. Ask them:
http://www.angelbird.com/en/home/

OWC still says that their drives don't require TRIM even though the owner of their NAND (Seagate) says the drives work better if TRIM is enabled.

Are you using any disk maintenance tools other than Disk Utility? If so, stop. Never ever, ever, ever run iDefrag on an SSD. If you formatted with Write to Zeros, reformat without or run Erase Empty Space from Disk Utility.

Samsung 840 EVO did have a performance issue that was addressed in two firmware updates. I would think that if you are getting refurbs, these have been updated. Just in case...
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... loads.html

This issue did not affect the 840 Pro, 845 or 850 nor any of the earlier SSDs.

[Digiuser]

Thanks for the info. I do not use any defrag software. Occasionally run disk utility. What is strange is once I copy data to the drive and then test it with low numbers, even an initializatiin or standard erase won't bring it back to life. It's like it's permanently damaged. I have 3 other 840 pros which have all of my libraries in them in the same enclosure and they work perfectly. But now I've gone through three new 840 pros and thy all have the same issue. The amount of samples I can stream from the other three drives via thunderbolt is astounding. I hope the Owc drive works in place of the Samsung!
End if it's a bit slower than a wide open Samsung, I'd be happy. But 80MB/s on an SSD is no good for me.
So nobody else has SSD's via thunderbolt on a Mac? I didn't think it was so cutting edge.

[HCMarkus]

Still "old" school with my hot-rodded 4,1 loaded with SSDs using trim and no issues. My SSDs are all Intel (I've had 'em for a while) that use the Sandforce controller with Intel firmware. They may not be the fastest, but have been rock solid for me.

Suggestion: try putting your problem drives in an older Mac Pro (if you or a friend has one available) on an internal SATA bus and running Disk Utility "repair disk" with trim enabled on the startup disk. This will trim your SSD (only works if the SSD is not the boot drive). Make a difference?

[mikehalloran]

It's like it's permanently damaged.

Are you able to run the firmware updater? You may need to do it on a PC or Mac that lets you connect via SATA.

[Digiuser]

Samsung said since the replacement drive they sent would be he most current firmware. On a good note, I installed the OWC 6G and so far it is working great. 300MB/s write, 500MB/s read...even after copying my 240gb of record drive data on to it. Will keep an eye on it and de rig tanks like the samsung's did.

[HCMarkus]

Samsung said since the replacement drive they sent would be he most current firmware. On a good note, I installed the OWC 6G and so far it is working great. 300MB/s write, 500MB/s read...even after copying my 240gb of record drive data on to it. Will keep an eye on it and de rig tanks like the samsung's did.

The OWC may use a Sandforce controller which, due to data compression, tolerates no-Trim situations better than many other drives. WAV/AIFF audio data recorded in DP sessions is highly compressible.

[Digiuser]

What is weird is that the Samsung worked for about 13 months great. And then I've been in this rabbit hole with it. Perhaps an OS change is Mac did something at some point.
Just to reiterate, my other 3 connects Samsung 840pros [512GB] all work well. Those contain all of my sample VI libraries so aside from the initial library install, they are read only. But what is killing me is that I copied one set of files to the "New" warranty replacement Samsung [about 240GB's worth] and BAM! Super low write speed when benchmarking.
I just did a big session with the OWC today, including copying the 240GB worth of sessions over to it. Read and Write performance is fast and the same as when I first initialized the drive yesterday. Will keep a close eye on it...but I am hopeful. I wish there was a way that I could re-initialize the 2 Samsung 840Pros that I have sitting here so they will at least get back up to speed and then I can maybe sell them to somebody half price or something.

[Digiuser]

***UPDATE***
After much troubleshooting...and new SSD drive purchasing [OWC 6G]. I finally came to the conclusiong that my issues with the SSD speeds were related to my Promise Pegasus J4 enclosure. I just received a new OWC Thunderbay4 MINI and now everything seems to be working great. All of the SSD's in the enclosure are reporting their SMART status as well as indicating that TRIM is enabled. It is indicated as active in both the system profiler and in the app "Disk Sensei". Also, the Samsung SSD that was no longer writing over 80MB/S was able to be initialized in the new OWC enclosure and is working great. So in the end, I don't think I needed to buy a new OWC 6G drive...but now I have a backup.
The people at OWC were very knowledgeable with regards to thunderbolt connections and external SSD and were bale to answer some very particular questions that I had. When I called Promise to talk with them, they only said that the J4 is no longer supported. I then said, well then let's pretend I am going to buy one of your new enclosures....does TRIM permeate to externally connected SSD's via thunderbolt?? They said "no" with their equipment. Bye Bye promise. Now I just need to figure out what to do with this pegasus J4 other than making it into a doorstop.

[HCMarkus]

Thanks for reporting back; glad you resolved the issue.