Audio Glitches with new SSD

[Prime Mover]

I just got a new 1TB SSD form OWC for my 2011 MacBook Pro. Huge improvement with speed overall. However, I found one concerning problem with DP8. Before, if I was running a very CPU-heavy project, when I would hit start, it would wait a good 3-4seconds before playing, but when it did, the audio would be perfectly smooth. Now, it starts playing immediately, but glitches every few seconds, as if it hasn't taken the time to buffer and is falling over itself. This is with the buffer setting the same (512), I can set it to higher, but then I start to feel the latency whenever I start recording.

Anyone have any experience with this issue? Everything is set to "PreGen", so I would really expect there to be much CPU draw in the first place, but I never did find PreGen to work all that well.

[Prime Mover]

Never mind! Found the problem. I had an open window of B4-II/32Lives running in the background, which are always very prone to CPU spikes. I closed that and everything is running smooth as butter! I even brought the buffer down to 256 and it's working beautifully!

All hail the SSD!

[HCMarkus]

Having just spent some time updating my system and dealing with backup spinners, I was reminded how quick SSDs are in comparison. Have fun working instead of waiting for projects to load!

[Prime Mover]

I spoke a little too soon, but I don't think it's the SSD.

Suddenly B4-II is taking up an enormous amount of resources and glitching all through DP8. I saw it as a sign and decided to switch over to B5, which actually is great for the jazz-based thing I'm working on now, but B4-II is still my mainstay organ, and I'm gonna need it for the big rock stuff. Tried updating to 32Lives v2, but it's not really any better.

UPDATE: This seems to be limited to just DP8, or at least, doesn't seem to be a problem in Apple MainStage (Thank God). I wonder what's going on?

[mikehalloran]

Look at Console. See if something is trying to load that shouldn't or failing to load that should. Everything is time stamped. What's going on?

[tommymandel]

Nice hat, Mike. You wear many hats, including helpful authority here, just thought I'd give the actual hat a shout out!

[mikehalloran]

Nice hat, Mike. You wear many hats, including helpful authority here, just thought I'd give the actual hat a shout out!

Well thank you. That's a Stetson I picked up in Texas in 2005. The picture was taken at the Grand Nationals Rodeo this last October at the Cow Palace.

[muscletn]

I wanted to weigh in on this one. I too bought a 1 ter. OWC SSD, 3G.
I had upgraded my 8-core 2.26ghz 2009 MacPro to a 12-core 3.46ghz, and the SSD was part of the upgrade. Things were going blazingly well for around a month, when it started to beachball upon launching Google Chrome. I would Force Quit Chrome, re-launch, and then things were good...until launching DP 9.1 after the Force Quit of Chrome. (There are some known issues about Chrome and SSD's, but that's another discussion.) DP would beachball on the title page and get no further. A computer re-start fixed things, until the process began to accelerate and occur with increasing regularity. There was now generalized wackiness in DP, the Dock (it would disappear), and Finder.
After spending several hours with my tech, we determined the culprit to be the OWC SSD. As soon as I swapped it out for my WD 7200 Black back-up, all was well. PLEASE EVERYONE, DILIGENTLY BACK UP YOUR BOOT DRIVE!! My last back up was only a few weeks old, so I was up and running very quickly.

My tech took the SSD home, did some tests, but nothing definitive showed up. He did, however, have difficulty in getting it to boot consistently.
I have sent the SSD back to OWC for evaluation. In the meantime, I was told the smart choice is Samsung, so I ordered one. The other consideration is that for most of us in DAW world a 500 gig SSD is more than sufficient.
If OWC sends me a replacement, it will end up on Ebay.

[mikehalloran]

The OWC drives have had some issues. Some of them can be traced to OWC insisting that TRIM is not necessary.

I have over 100 tabs open in Chrome on 3 monitors for my day job. Still waiting for any of those 'known issues' to affect me. I can state that the two times Chrome froze on me, DP had been on from the day before and I had zero available free RAM. I had forgotten to reboot and had not quit DP. Force-quitting DP brought Chrome back to life. I then ran sudo purge in Terminal to free up more (rebooting during my work day is never something I want to do as pages don't always reload to where I left them).

So... was the memory leak in DP or one of the many plugs or VIs that loads? No idea but I know the culprit is not Chrome. I have not experienced this since maxing out my iMac to 32G.

I try to reboot every day but sometimes get calls before breakfast and might skip doing so.

[frankf]

I've never had a problem with OWC SSDs with my current Mac Pro 2013 6,1 (El Capitan) or previous Mac Pro 2008 3,1 (Yosemite) with trim (I don't enable it as per OWC). I have 5 of them. I don't use Chrome either or use these Macs for non music tasks, FWIW. Just sayin' and yeah lucky me.

[mikehalloran]

I've never had a problem with OWC SSDs with my current Mac Pro 2013 6,1 (El Capitan) or previous Mac Pro 2008 3,1 (Yosemite) with trim (I don't enable it as per OWC). I have 5 of them. I don't use Chrome either or use these Macs for non music tasks, FWIW. Just sayin' and yeah lucky me.

If you have a 2013 Mac Pro, TRIM is enabled by default unless you are not booting from the internal SSD. It is enabled automatically on any SSDs connected via USB 3 or Thunderbolt.

[frankf]

Really? I hadn't bothered to check Trim on my external SSDs as it wasn't enabled on my MP 3,1. I did notice Trim was enabled on the 6,1 internal 1T Apple SSD. I'll take another look today. Thanks.

[tommymandel]

Hi Frank, it's been a long time since Songshop days! This question is to Mike also.
The Crucial MX300 2TB SSD I've put into my 2011 mid-late MBP has been working great, although I've not been super-taxing it, other than a pretty extended MainStage Concert, and DP fun projects with up to 8 VI's and a 12 stereo audio tracks. After reading the above exchange, I checked in System Report, and it says TRIM support = Unavailable.
Maybe I should have spend another 30% for the Samsung Pro product; but is it true that, since only 675GB of the 2TB is used, I won't run into the type of errors SSDs are said to be prone to, even without TRIM? Or is there a Terminal command to enable it on any SSD? And is that something I'd want to do now, or only when the disk gets over 50% written to?
Thanks. It's great to have such knowledgeable users available with smart answers to hard questions.

Crucial_CT2050MX300SSD1:

Capacity: 2.05 TB (2,050,408,636,416 bytes)
Model: Crucial_CT2050MX300SSD1
Revision: M0CR031
Serial Number: 1643xxxFEDAA
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Medium Type: Solid State
TRIM Support: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:

[mikehalloran]

Beginning OS 10.4, with all third party SSDs, run the following in Terminal:

sudo trimforce enable

You will be asked to enter your admin password any time you run a sudo command. There will be a sarcastic CYA message that Apple doesn't support this—it's not their drive so of course they don't.

This does not work before OS 10.4. In 10.3 or earlier, you should download and install the Cindori app—free to enable TRIM; $10 to activate any of its other features.
https://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/

Enabling TRIM is done from the boot drive only.

[tommymandel]

Thank you, Mike.