Samsung 840 slower than my old HDD

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gearshift

gearshift

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Jan 4, 2016
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Just realised my Samsung 840 120gb (not EVO, not PRO) is slower than my ~8yrs old HDD 250gb. SSD has been used for 2yrs, single partition OS X on it, used as my main drive ~10h/day. Now after switching to desktop and a clean install I ran some benchmarks.

Details:
- Connection is SATA2 3Gb/s so I'm aware of the SATA2 limitation.
- SSD only has freshly installed OS, so only about 10gb occupied.
- It's using AHCI.
- TRIM was never enabled on it in OS X. Unless the SSD has it's own internal TRIM?
- Never did firmware update.

See screenshots. Seq writes are obviously slower than HDD. Will it help if I run firmware update and Samsung magician-what-not tasks from a Win pc? I have no problem with deleting current data on the SSD.

Btw, notice the graph: green line (write speed) plummeting from 257mbs to 32mbs. Is this normal for the 840?

http://imgur.com/jmAbjtS
 
Solution
drtweak
Might want to read up on this.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-pro-ssd-trim,3538.html

I'm not sure the effects of the 840 on the Mac, but I do know that when they first came out (or maybe it was the 830) that the firmware either wasn't compatible with the Mac's or caused to be really slow because OSX at the time didn't support trim. Not sure about the latest version of OSX since I don't use mac but I know the 850's should work fine with Macs and i think the newest firmware for the 840 should be good.

So I would

1) Update firmware first and foremost. You may need a windows PC to do it not sure.
2) Enable trim is you have OSX 10.10.4 or higher here...
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drtweak

drtweak

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Sep 17, 2012
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Might want to read up on this.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-pro-ssd-trim,3538.html

I'm not sure the effects of the 840 on the Mac, but I do know that when they first came out (or maybe it was the 830) that the firmware either wasn't compatible with the Mac's or caused to be really slow because OSX at the time didn't support trim. Not sure about the latest version of OSX since I don't use mac but I know the 850's should work fine with Macs and i think the newest firmware for the 840 should be good.

So I would

1) Update firmware first and foremost. You may need a windows PC to do it not sure.
2) Enable trim is you have OSX 10.10.4 or higher here http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/06/latest-os-x-update-allows-you-to-enable-trim-for-third-party-ssds/

If you are not running 10.10.4 or higher then you are either stuck or have to upgrade. If you can't upgrade or won't then also know not having TRIM on will reduce the life of the SSD. How much all depends on how much data is written to it over time.

3) Look for a Apple OEM SSD which is supported though the OSX System.

BUT either way it SHOULD still be getting faster speeds than what you are getting. Do you have another Mac and/or PC to toss it in and benchmark it there? I would say if you can get a hold of a windows 7 or higher machine, and just slave it over (may have to format as NTFS) and then download and run AS SSD Benchmark and see how fast you get since windows 7 and up will automaticlly enable trim.
 
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