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APFS + TRIM slows down some SSDs

Chrizx74

Chrizx74

macrumors member
Original poster
May 14, 2016
34
5
Let's try make a report here with make and models of the SSDs affected by boot and r/w slow downs.
I have a 256Gb 840 EVO.
HS w/ supplemental update and trim enabled takes 47 seconds from chime to desktop (auto login).
I will add the time later with TRIM disabled. Macmini late 2014 2.6Ghz.
 
cottonmouthh said:
they were talking about disabling trim to solve the problem
Click to expand...

Yes I understand that TRIM is the problem. What I am trying to do is collect information on different SSDs make/model behavior. For example a friend of mine has the same MacMini with 850 Pro and TRIM enabled makes boot faster.
So we need to understand what SSDs are affected and which not.
 
cottonmouthh said:
they were talking about disabling trim to solve the problem
Click to expand...

Well it's not really a solution, more an awkard compromise. We should not have to disable TRIM, that makes no sense.

To be honest, I can live with it, I don't want to disable TRIM, as the boot sequence is not exactly the most critical moment when I use my computer... Still it's a little annoying. Apple needs to fix to fix this, we don't even know why it happens. Even with verbose on, there's no clear answer.
[doublepost=1507383880][/doublepost]
Chrizx74 said:
So we need to understand what SSDs are affected and which not.
Click to expand...

Well, I'll start then :) Mine is affected: Kingston V300 240GB.
 
Morpheo said:
Well it's not really a solution, more an awkard compromise. We should not have to disable TRIM, that makes no sense.

To be honest, I can live with it, I don't want to disable TRIM, as the boot sequence is not exactly the most critical moment when I use my computer... Still it's a little annoying. Apple needs to fix to fix this, we don't even know why it happens. Even with verbose on, there's no clear answer.
[doublepost=1507383880][/doublepost]

Well, I'll start then :) Mine is affected: Kingston V300 240GB.
Click to expand...

Could you check boot time with and without trim enabled? What mac do you have? I don't want to disable TRIM either but I am experiencing a slow drive also after boot. For example now WhatsApp app takes more time to open and it also shows a bar while loading. This never happened before HS. Also benchmarking the drive with and without TRIM shows different results. Without TRIM it's faster.
 
My experience seems to be the inverse. Disabling TRIM causes slow boot.

Background: I have an iMac 13,1 with an external USB connected Samsung Evo 850 which I unthinkingly enabled TRIM for (also my first SSD and arrived the day High Sierra was released). Later, reading some of the slow boot threads - not that I found my boot to be slow coming from a spinner - I learned that TRIM had no value for an USB connected device so I figured I should disable it. I did and now have a 90 second delay from chime to Apple logo appearing, then 28 seconds for the system to be live. It is that 90 second pause that has appeared since disabling.

I've thought about reenabling TRIM to see if it the problem goes, but decided not to mess with anything else until some solutions to slow boot emerge.
 
hideous cheese said:
My experience seems to be the inverse. Disabling TRIM causes slow boot.

Background: I have an iMac 13,1 with an external USB connected Samsung Evo 850 which I unthinkingly enabled TRIM for (also my first SSD and arrived the day High Sierra was released). Later, reading some of the slow boot threads - not that I found my boot to be slow coming from a spinner - I learned that TRIM had no value for an USB connected device so I figured I should disable it. I did and now have a 90 second delay from chime to Apple logo appearing, then 28 seconds for the system to be live. It is that 90 second pause that has appeared since disabling.

I've thought about reenabling TRIM to see if it the problem goes, but decided not to mess with anything else until some solutions to slow boot emerge.
Click to expand...

Try verbose booting to see what happens during those 90 seconds. (CMD V at boot)
 
News. Today I made a complete Time Machine backup, then from an High Sierra USB installer I went into Recovery and formatted the SSD. After that I restored the backup to disk and to my surprise boot time is now back to 23/26 seconds with auto login. Disk is an 840 evo 256GB. Now since these disks are known to suffer of degradation over time maybe rewriting all data was the solution. Only thing was DropBox resynced everything in the DropBox folder.
 
Last edited:
Chrizx74 said:
News. Today I made a complete Time Machine backup, then from an High Sierra USB installer I went into Recovery and formatted the SSD. After that I restored the backup to disk and to my surprise boot time is not back to 23/26 seconds with auto login. Disk is an 840 evo 256GB. Now since these disks are known to suffer of degradation over time maybe rewriting all data was the solution. Only thing was DropBox resynced everything in the DropBox folder.
Click to expand...

The slow read issue was fixed long long time ago (require SSD firmware upgrade). And I can confirm that on my Mac Pro 5,1 with the 1TB 840 Evo, disable TRIM make boot faster. I didn't really time it, and I can't do that right now (I still have some videos encoding, that will take few more days to finish), but I can easily tell disabling TRIM make my Mac boot time like Sierra. Enable TRIM make an extra 15-20s (at least) to the boot time. But I personally don't really that care about boot time, I rarely boot / restart my Mac, it basically run 24/7. Therefore, TRIM is definitely more important to me.

Pretty sure your "restore" accidentally fixed some OS issue, but not the slow read issue. High Sierra only released for about 2 weeks. All the system files on your SSD is pretty "new" indeed, the slows read bugs was talking about reading performance degradation when reading some data that stored for more than 3 months. You case simply not fall into that situation.
 
I don't know what happened with the backup / restore. Now boot takes 26 secs and TRIM is enabled. It took 48/48 secs before.
 
More evidence TRIM is not the problem. I restored another mac that was taking 58 secs at boot. Now it's down to 27. SSD is OCZ vertex 3 and TRIM is active.
 
Chrizx74 said:
More evidence TRIM is not the problem. I restored another mac that was taking 58 secs at boot. Now it's down to 27. SSD is OCZ vertex 3 and TRIM is active.
Click to expand...

I think TRIM is related, but just not always causing issue. Most bug in MacOS only happen on some specific condition, not always 100% reproducible.

There are plenty of users tested (including myself), disable TRIM can fix the slow boot straight away. Obviously it is TRIM related. However, a clean install may be one of the way to permineny fix this issue.
 
h9826790 said:
I think TRIM is related, but just not always causing issue. Most bug in MacOS only happen on some specific condition, not always 100% reproducible.

There are plenty of users tested (including myself), disable TRIM can fix the slow boot straight away. Obviously it is TRIM related. However, a clean install may be one of the way to permineny fix this issue.
Click to expand...

Even though disabling TRIM results in a faster boot , disabling it it's not a viable solution. I checked the volumes before restoring and the VM volume was just 30k, after restoring it's 1,9 Gb. It could be something related to how HFS to APFS conversion handles that (or other) Volumes. For example on my Mini the VM volume was reported the same size of the main volume, pretty strange.
 
Chrizx74 said:
Even though disabling TRIM results in a faster boot , disabling it it's not a viable solution. I checked the volumes before restoring and the VM volume was just 30k, after restoring it's 1,9 Gb. It could be something related to how HFS to APFS conversion handles that (or other) Volumes. For example on my Mini the VM volume was reported the same size of the main volume, pretty strange.
Click to expand...

I agree. I just want to point out that the disable TRIM test shows the issue is TRIM related.
 
Seems to me that one can disable TRIM (from being "active all the time"), then boot from the recovery partition, then run Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" function.

During the repair, DU should put up the message "Trimming unused blocks", which should get the SSD "back into shape" insofar as TRIM is concerned.

DU trims unused blocks when doing a repair under HFS+.
Then again, not sure if it can do so under APFS (I don't use APFS and have no plans to move to it for several years to come).

Someone else will have to try this and post their findings.
 
Fishrrman said:
Seems to me that one can disable TRIM (from being "active all the time"), then boot from the recovery partition, then run Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" function.

During the repair, DU should put up the message "Trimming unused blocks", which should get the SSD "back into shape" insofar as TRIM is concerned.

DU trims unused blocks when doing a repair under HFS+.
Then again, not sure if it can do so under APFS (I don't use APFS and have no plans to move to it for several years to come).

Someone else will have to try this and post their findings.
Click to expand...

AFAIK the OS trims the drive everytime a user deletes some data. Anyway it would be interesting to see what happens in the way you suggested.
 
I just installed a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB in my 2011 mini. I installed HS from internet recovery and I'm downloading all my files, so it's basically being set up as a new mini.

Do I need to enable TRIM or should it already be enabled for me? This is my first time with an SSD so I'm not up to speed with some of this. I'm ok with it taking a few seconds longer if having it enabled is better in the long term. I'm assuming Apple will fix it soon, if that's the case.
 
davidg4781 said:
I just installed a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB in my 2011 mini. I installed HS from internet recovery and I'm downloading all my files, so it's basically being set up as a new mini.

Do I need to enable TRIM or should it already be enabled for me? This is my first time with an SSD so I'm not up to speed with some of this. I'm ok with it taking a few seconds longer if having it enabled is better in the long term. I'm assuming Apple will fix it soon, if that's the case.
Click to expand...

You need to enable TRIM by running terminal command

Code: 
trimforce enable
 
Thanks. I'm currently in the process of downloading apps and media. Is there any reason I need to do that before I finish downloading or can it wait until after?

My internet is slow as Christmas right now (Spectrum) and I'd prefer not to interrupt any downloads if I can. Right now it's apps I need or iCloud kind of doing it's own thing.
 
davidg4781 said:
Thanks. I'm currently in the process of downloading apps and media. Is there any reason I need to do that before I finish downloading or can it wait until after?

My internet is slow as Christmas right now (Spectrum) and I'd prefer not to interrupt any downloads if I can. Right now it's apps I need or iCloud kind of doing it's own thing.
Click to expand...
No need to rush, you can wait and activate TRIM when the system is free to do it.
 
Morpheo said:
Well it's not really a solution, more an awkard compromise. We should not have to disable TRIM, that makes no sense.

To be honest, I can live with it, I don't want to disable TRIM, as the boot sequence is not exactly the most critical moment when I use my computer... Still it's a little annoying. Apple needs to fix to fix this, we don't even know why it happens. Even with verbose on, there's no clear answer.
[doublepost=1507383880][/doublepost]

Well, I'll start then :) Mine is affected: Kingston V300 240GB.
Click to expand...
Mine too 500GB 840 EVO. I have disabled trim. Apple guru said that's OK to not have trim.
[doublepost=1510697920][/doublepost]Apple guru said that's OK to not have trim. Mine is a 500GB EVO 840
 
El Capitan and Samsung EVO 850 SSD is a no go. Disabling TRIM causes slow writing speeds on my MacPro after two months.
Perhaps it's different with APFS but with HFS TRIM is recommended.
 
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