Mac Pro w/SSD Save As Lag/Delay?

[inaka]

Hey all, I have Lion 10.7.4 on a MacPro5,1 hexccore. Just installed the Crucial M4 512GB SSD into the second optical bay and cloned my OS and all Applications in it.

Everything is working great with fast startup and app load times, but today I noticed something I never saw with a traditional hard drive.

In illustrator, I often have to launch illustrator source files, outline all fonts and then save the file as a PDF. Well, when I went to do this today, after selecting "Save As..." the dialog box would pop up where you can name the file and select the file type, and it would just freeze before I could select the file type. (I'd say the delay was maybe 5-10 seconds.). You can't do anything. You can't type the file name, you can't use the pull down menu to select the file type, etc. it's just stuck.

The real problem is that I have to sometimes do this many times. Today, I had to do it with 14 files in a row, and the freeze/delay was incredibly frustrating.

Has anyone seen this type of delay with ssd drives? Is it common?
Ay ideas?

 

[Hellhammer]

Do you have any other drives installed? Your system might be waiting for another drive to spin up as it's not sure where you want to save it. Try disabling hard drive sleep in System Preferences.

 

[inaka]

Good idea, but I have always Energy Saver set to never sleep and put hard drives to sleep when possible is unchecked.

Also, since I did this like 14 times in a row, I think if it's sleep related, it would be an issue on the first one, but not after that as even a spun down drive would now be up and running.

This one has me stumped, unless it's a crucial firmware issue maybe?

 

[inaka]

Darn, I just checked the firmware on my Crucial M4 and it's already on the latest Rev 000F...so I guess that's out as an option too. Hmmm...

 

[derbothaus]

I thought Sandforce was supposed to have this problem. Not Crucial.

 

[ytk]

Open up Disk Utility and verify the disk. You might also repair disk permissions, but verifying it would be the first step. Sometimes having a damaged filesystem can cause weird, random slowdowns.

 

[VirtualRain]

Do you have any other drives installed? Your system might be waiting for another drive to spin up as it's not sure where you want to save it. Try disabling hard drive sleep in System Preferences.

Exactly. This happens to me occasionally when the system has to spin up my Time Capsule drive of all things even though I only use it for Time Machine backups!

 

[inaka]

Open up Disk Utility and verify the disk. You might also repair disk permissions, but verifying it would be the first step. Sometimes having a damaged filesystem can cause weird, random slowdowns.

Thanks for the heads up.
I did both a permissions repair and a disk verify and everything is listed as OK.

Verifying volume “Mac Pro SSD”
Checking file systemPerforming live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
[B]The volume Mac Pro SSD appears to be OK.[/B]

Hmmm....

 

[ytk]

Hmm, indeed.

Well, the only other thing I can think of is that sometimes cloning a drive doesn't work 100% properly. I cloned my laptop drive onto an SSD once and things were basically working fine, but somehow all of the permissions got borked and every now and then a weird bug would come up.

So, the first step would be to reinstall Illustrator (or all of Adobe CS, really). Do a complete uninstall, reboot, reinstall. If that doesn't help, then the next step is to reinstall the OS. I'm not sure if you can just reinstall in place with Lion, but there should be some option to do that. If even that fails, then the last step would be to back up your files, wipe the SSD, and do a clean install of just the OS and Adobe CS. If the problem goes away, copy back your files and see if it starts happening again. If it does, I'd say it's a problem with the SSD and you should return it at that point.

 

[inaka]

Thanks for your help, but it's not illustrator. On this Mac Pro, it's my work machine, and I actually have Illustrator CS3, CS5 and CS5.1 all loaded in. I can replicate the delay/freeze with every version of Illustrator. I also don't think cloning is the issue at all. These are binary 0's and 1's, with direct digital copies of all data, then with permissions repairs.

I'm looking at the SSD's firmware. I'm going to try to downgrade the SSDs firmware from 000F to 0309 and see if that solves it. I'll post back here either way.

 

[derbothaus]

I am assuming you have tried this with fresh Illustrator prefs and settings and it is reproducible? Does it happen with any other apps? Illustrator is the weakest app on the planet for saves and dialog boxes. I know you mentioned how this behavior only started with the new SSD. But I hate me some carbonized, unoptimized, single core using Illustrator.

 

[inaka]

I am assuming you have tried this with fresh Illustrator prefs and settings and it is reproducible? Does it happen with any other apps? Illustrator is the weakest app on the planet for saves and dialog boxes. I know you mentioned how this behavior only started with the new SSD. But I hate me some carbonized, unoptimized, single core using Illustrator.

Yup. Fresh prefs, and it's reproducible with every version of Illustrator that I have on the machine.

I think I'll just return the SSD and wait for things to settle. Since this is a work machine, reliability is paramount and the 1TB Caviar black as the OS/Applications is acceptable. Especially since I don't reboot the machine very much at all, I just wake from sleep, and have apps already running the background. I'll drown my SSD sorrows by bumping up the RAM to 24GB.

 

[ytk]

Thanks for your help, but it's not illustrator. On this Mac Pro, it's my work machine, and I actually have Illustrator CS3, CS5 and CS5.1 all loaded in. I can replicate the delay/freeze with every version of Illustrator.

It could still be some shared library causing the problem, but if it's happening with multiple versions, you're probably right that it's not Illustrator.

I also don't think cloning is the issue at all. These are binary 0's and 1's, with direct digital copies of all data, then with permissions repairs.

Depends on how you cloned it. That's only true if you cloned it at the block level, which is unlikely because you'd have to have the same size drive for your source and target. If you did it at the filesystem level, then it's possible something was modified during the copy. At any rate, even if you're sure that it was a bit-perfect copy, the next step would be to reinstall the OS and see if that makes a difference.

 

[inaka]

I sincerely thank you all for your help.
Again, since this is a work machine, I think I'm going to send the SSD back. I've only used this for work, which is why I noticed the Illustrator problem. But there could be many other similar issues that I don't want to have to troubleshoot.

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I think what sealed the deal for me was reading the Crucial forums and the amount of people experiencing the same problem of freezes and/or spinning beachballs for 10-30 secs. From those forums it seems to be possibly related to the 000F firmware.

I know forums in general only highlight issues, and there are likely quite a few people using the M4 without issues, but I'll wait until the dust settles a bit on this.

 

[kalex]

I started geting these on my M4 128GB ssd. It got really bad and what fixed it for me was to actually upgrade firmare from 002 to the latest one. That seemed to fix the problem for me. BTW my ssd was working fine for a while and then just one day out of the blue it started doing this. After firmware update it stopped

 

[juanml82]

You could try to see if it happens with other applications. But I agree you should return it. Reliability is more important than... well, anything else. You could get it replaced under warranty, if you want to keep it. Now, if a replacement causes the same problem, return it.