SSD incompatibility with El Cap

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stratology

Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by stratology »

HCMarkus wrote: It is recommended by everyone I have read and whom I know, with one exception. Guess who that exception is...
That exception would be Apple, they post an explicit warning when someone tries to enable Trim in Terminal.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by mikehalloran »

stratology wrote:
mikehalloran wrote:old issues long resolved.
Link?
Has Apple removed the warning?

Issues may not be easily recognised - didn't you report elsewhere that your Disk Utility doesn't work correctly anymore? To name just one example...
You need to understand that Apple will never remove that warning—ever. To do so would put them in a position of being potentially responsible for supporting products that aren't theirs, in this case, 3rd party drives. They don't, never have, never will but, when you put them inside Apple hardware, the warnings are harsh.

I found that Disk Utility in El Cap is that it no longer works properly with HHDs made before a certain date including those supplied by Apple. My only real issue with this is that Apple has not documented it. Apple drive engineers whom I know were surprised by this news but when do they deal with hardware over 8 ears old except at home? Never.

I will no longer respond to anything you post when it makes me look like I'm arguing with a 13 year old.
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stratology

Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by stratology »

mikehalloran wrote:You need to understand that Apple will never remove that warning—ever. To do so would put them in a position of being potentially responsible for supporting products that aren't theirs, in this case, 3rd party drives. They don't, never have, never will but, when you put them inside Apple hardware, the warnings are harsh.
Like most of your posts, there is some truth, mixed with utter nonsense.

You are correct that Apple does not support 3rd party disks. If you had even the smallest experience with how Apple support actually works, you would also be aware that data are always the users' responsibility, Apple never takes any responsibility for data loss.

So your assumption that this is what the warning is about Apple not taking responsibility makes no sense at all. Apple never takes responsibility for data loss, so there's no need to put a warning about that in Terminal, when attempting to execute an obscure command, of all places.



mikehalloran wrote: I will no longer respond to anything you post when it makes me look like I'm arguing with a 13 year old.
Using rudeness to make up for lack of technical expertise is not a meaningful way to discuss a technical topic.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Phil O »

http://www.appleworld.today/blog/2015/7 ... party-ssds

Note the date of the article - July 1, 2015

"Yesterday, Apple released Mac OS X 10.10.4, providing a number of bug fixes and subtle improvements to the currently shipping version of the desktop operating system. According to Ars Technica, one of those improvements is the addition of support for TRIM on third-party solid state drives (SSDs).

TRIM isn't something most users worry about; it's a system-level command that provides communication between the operating system and SSD regarding unused areas of the drive that are ready for erasure and overwriting. Without TRIM, drives can become much slower as more data is added to the device. OS X has supported TRIM for built-in SSDs, but not for third-party drives that were added after the fact. Often, those drives came with proprietary tools to enable TRIM.

10.10.4 includes a command-line utility called trimforce that adds TRIM support. When run, the utility requires a reboot to take effect. Ars Technica's Lee Hutchinson reports that Apple has added "scary warnings" about using the utility, most likely because not all third-party SSDs operate in the same way and some data could be lost in the process."


So it looks like trimforce is not some obscure Terminal command as you have stated. It was clearly ADDED by Apple for the sole purpose of supporting Trim on 3rd party drives. Also check out the date at the bottom of the trimforce man page - 27 April 2015.

I respectfully submit that you are in error, sir, and the warnings from Apple are most likely as Mr. Hutchinson suggests.

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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by James Steele »

Okay.... STRATOLOGY... this is to YOU.

That's what is known as a "cover your ass" disclaimer by Apple. Anybody with half a brain knows that. I'm sick to death of this crap. Just let this stuff go and your personal ego thing about having to have the last word on every technical issue. To me THAT is "utter nonsense." Things went along mostly smoothly around here until your arrival at this board. So either learn to just let it go, or leave the board. I really don't care which option you choose. Thanks.
stratology wrote:
mikehalloran wrote:You need to understand that Apple will never remove that warning—ever. To do so would put them in a position of being potentially responsible for supporting products that aren't theirs, in this case, 3rd party drives. They don't, never have, never will but, when you put them inside Apple hardware, the warnings are harsh.
Like most of your posts, there is some truth, mixed with utter nonsense.

You are correct that Apple does not support 3rd party disks. If you had even the smallest experience with how Apple support actually works, you would also be aware that data are always the users' responsibility, Apple never takes any responsibility for data loss.

So your assumption that this is what the warning is about Apple not taking responsibility makes no sense at all. Apple never takes responsibility for data loss, so there's no need to put a warning about that in Terminal, when attempting to execute an obscure command, of all places.



mikehalloran wrote: I will no longer respond to anything you post when it makes me look like I'm arguing with a 13 year old.
Using rudeness to make up for lack of technical expertise is not a meaningful way to discuss a technical topic.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by James Steele »

Nevermind. Stratology popped off with another know-it-all, smart ass answer when someone suggested repairing permissions.

Okay... let me repeat: THIS IS NOT MY PAYING JOB RUNNING THIS BOARD. I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR PATIENCE OF THIS SILLINESS.

Hence... Stratology's user account has been deleted.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Phil O »

I (and others) tried my hardest to point out to him in a calm and reasonable manner that he was wrong, but I guess my efforts were in vain. He has been pushing people's buttons here since he joined. So sorry that you had to get involved, James. Thanks again for all your hard work on this board.

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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Sean Kenny »

Second that ..... Really appreciate the value of this board!
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by HCMarkus »

Taps sounds, mournful, in the distance...

Thanks for rational management James. Not to mention most excellent.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Timeline »

While my boot exists in a spinner on my Mac, I activated Trim as you have recommended. I noticed when opening Safari, The drive started to agressively search or activate as well clicking away. Fearful of security issues I immediately installed Apple security blocks and the drive stopped its activity. There must be allot of dangerous predators out there it seems waiting to invade with trim off.

Anyway, 2 new SSD drives arrive in a few days and I will attempt to copy my OS and try try again. Thanks Mike for the work you put in on this subject. Seems you were ahead of your time as most would never be searching this issue had they not tried the SSD boot update to their computers. A sticky is a good idea but I would also keep this open here as most, i think, may look here first. Cheers, GB
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by mikehalloran »

Timeline wrote:While my boot exists in a spinner on my Mac, I activated Trim as you have recommended. I noticed when opening Safari, The drive started to agressively search or activate as well clicking away. Fearful of security issues I immediately installed Apple security blocks and the drive stopped its activity. There must be allot of dangerous predators out there it seems waiting to invade with trim off.

Anyway, 2 new SSD drives arrive in a few days and I will attempt to copy my OS and try try again. Thanks Mike for the work you put in on this subject. Seems you were ahead of your time as most would never be searching this issue had they not tried the SSD boot update to their computers. A sticky is a good idea but I would also keep this open here as most, i think, may look here first. Cheers, GB
TRIM has no effect on spinners. When activated from an HHD, it will clean up any attached SSDs since 10.10.4 which is a good thing. Before 10.10.4, you will run Repair Disk from Disk utility to manually TRIM attached SSDs.

There are a number of processes that can run needlessly in the background. A good thing to do once a year or so is a Safe Boot. Shut down and restart holding down the Shift key. This will clean your system cache and reset it to defaults. When done, shut down and restart normally.

If you still have this unusual activity, Console is your friend. It can be anything from a useless monitoring utility you never knew you had to an ancient print driver or other old code going haywire to actual malware that needs to be found and purged. My system went nuts when I installed OS 10.8.2 and it turned out to be four older programs, the weirdest being Finale 2009 help files (what the???). Another time, it was an old DisplayLink driver for my USB monitor. Another time, I found something that kept writing hundreds of times per minute, Googled it and found that a Safe Boot was the cure—never did know what caused the issue and, as long as it was fixed, I didn't care.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Timeline »

Excellent Mike I'll try that after the SSD's drive. Thanks again.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Armageddon »

Possibly off-topic and totally self-serving: about a year and half ago, I bought a WD Black2 Dual Drive for my (as it turned out) totally incompatible 2.14 GHz Nehalem black MacBook. For whatever reason, it was first a Windoze-only drive, then, it was Mac-compatible, but you needed Mavericks or later to run the setup software (the 2008 MacBooks could only run Lion) and setting up the firmware was a Unix tragedy. I somehow managed to get the MacBook to set it up as a 1.12 TB singular drive, but any file written across that border between the SSD and the spinner was hopelessly mangled. I wound up getting a 1TB analog drive and sticking the Black2 in a closet for about a year or so.

Since then, I upgraded to a MBP and am currently considering taking out the Superdrive and replacing it with a 1TB SSD secondary drive for samples. I also dug out my Black2 and decided to have it replaced by WD (whatever I can say about the drive, it does have a fairly awesome 5-year warranty attached to it). They promptly replaced it with a brand-new factory-sealed Black2, which, as far as I can tell, is also a model up from my original purchase (they made two differently models before discontinuing the drive). I have considered replacing my 1TB analog system drive with the Black2, but it's more likely that I'l stick with the analog drive ... which I may someday replace with another SSD or at least a fusion drive.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck with a brand-new Black2, still in the box, that I'm probably not going to do anything with. I've considered putting it on eBay, as the drive has been discontinued and the few places that still seem to have it in stock are selling it for about $300. It was definitely an intriguing concept when it came out, as it allowed you to theoretically have a 120GB SSD and a 1TB analog drive running internally on the same SATA port, although the caveats are, the 1TB analog drive is only 5400 rpm for some reason (a fact that WD did their damnedest to conceal -- I even asked a salesperson before purchasing and they insisted it was a 7200 rpm drive) and that two drives sharing the same bus means it's a bit slower than just having a full-on SSD. Oh, and setting it up, especially on a Mac, is a nightmare -- you have to create a UNIX boot disc on a USB thumb drive in order to update the firmware that should have already been updated when you bought it while having the Black2 inserted in the primary SATA hard drive slot in your laptop, then have your old hard drive hooked up (they include a dual USB-to-SATA connector) in order to run the actual setup software that configures the drives.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by mikehalloran »

If you can get anything near $300 for that WD, grab it now while you can. You can get a 1T SSD for less.

I don't understand what you mean by an "analog drive". If it's an HHD, replace it with an SSD and your MBP will feel like a new machine.

The only way to set up a hybrid drive in any Mac is either on the internal SATA bus or via eSATA.
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Re: SSD incompatibility with El Cap

Post by Armageddon »

mikehalloran wrote:If you can get anything near $300 for that WD, grab it now while you can. You can get a 1T SSD for less.

I don't understand what you mean by an "analog drive". If it's an HHD, replace it with an SSD and your MBP will feel like a new machine.

The only way to set up a hybrid drive in any Mac is either on the internal SATA bus or via eSATA.
http://create.pro/blog/how-to-create-a- ... d-for-mac/
Sorry for the confusion. I currently have a single 1TB 7200 rpm internal analog ("spinner" or "HDD") drive. I'm shortly going to remove my optical drive and replace that with a second 1TB SSD drive, mainly for samples. I'm likely going to be keeping my primary HDD as a system drive, as it would still be written to fairly often, and I'll be streaming audio and video from it. I've contemplated either getting a hybrid drive to replace my system drive, which would increase the speed from what I have now, or just installing the Black2, which may or may not be faster (the SSD would probably be a bit faster than my 7200 rpm HDD, but still not as fast as a singular SSD). I happen to like the reliability of my HDD, even though it's not as fast. Having a dedicated 1TB SSD secondary sample drive is less of a worry, since I can replace anything I'd potentially lose there easily enough, and that's where I would require fast streaming the most.

A Black2 drive, which I purchased about a year and a half ago, is not the same as a hybrid drive. A hybrid drive has about 8 GBs of Flash memory married to an HDD and it loads priority files into its Flash drive to mimic the access speed of an SSD. The Black2 is actually two different drives (a 120 GB SSD and a 1TB HDD) sharing one SATA port and is the same size as a regular 2.5" drive. You can configure it to show up as two different hard drives, or create one 1.12 TB drive, but it doesn't load priority files into its SSD section like a hybrid drive does. Whatever is written there is always there. The only way to set it up on the Mac is to use WD's proprietary software, which configures it as a dual drive or as a single fusion drive. In theory, if you set it up as a dual drive (pretty much the only reason you'd want to buy it), you would put your OS and your apps on the SSD and everything else on the HDD, where you wouldn't have to worry about exceeding your maximum number of SSD writes. I could elaborate further, or just direct you here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7682/the-wd-black2-review

Again, in theory, this sounds great. You have two disparate hard drives (one of which is an SSD) occupying the space one usually takes up without having to give up your optical drive, or having the option of installing a third drive in place of your optical drive. The main problem is, two drives occupying one SATA port means a bit of a slowdown from just SSD. The other problem is, the HDD is only 5400 rpm. Between those two problems and the overly-elaborate setup procedure on either a Mac or PC, all of which I was unaware of when I purchased it originally, my replacement Black2 is currently sitting unopened in its box and I'll probably look into selling it. WD has apparently stopped making them a while ago and doesn't appear to be pursuing the concept of "dual drives" anymore.
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