MacPro 3,1 with very slow SSD

[TravelerJoe]

I just upgraded my MacPro 3,1 with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD 1TB. I am running High Sierra. I formated the SDD using HFS+ and then cloned it from my old hard drive using Disk Utility. I did turn on TRIM. I have turned on FileVault and has finished encrypting the drive. The EVO is installed in a SATA II drive bay. I realize I will only get SATA II speeds. The system boots up much faster than with the old disk drive.

My system is running but very slow. The beach ball spins between nearly every mouse click. Way slower than the old disk drive ever was.

Anyone have any ideas for me? From reading these forums I would expect a small increase in disk access speed.

Thanks.

 

[Longer Lane]

Usually, an SSD will provide you with a much zippier experience. You should be able to identify in Activity Monitor, what is causing the lagginess. I can think of the following reasons:

1. indexing and rebuilding of caches (look for eg. mds in activity monitor) in which case the situation should improve after a while
2. Trim - usually, you should not have to tinker with the Trim settings. Either reverse your settings or start over again

 

[AidenShaw]

Enabling TRIM does not trim the drive -- it says *in the future* when a file is deleted, trim the released space. If the drive has ever been full, it will still be full even after enabling trim, and regardless of the amount of free space in the filesystem.

You should run a disk utility that trims all free space, then try again. (No need to rebuild the drive, just force a trim.)

See https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/26866906/

 

[Ludacrisvp]

If you have 64GB RAM it is known to slow down drive access.

 

[flaubert]

Enabling TRIM does not trim the drive -- it says *in the future* when a file is deleted, trim the released space. If the drive has ever been full, it will still be full even after enabling trim, and regardless of the amount of free space in the filesystem.

You should run a disk utility that trims all free space, then try again. (No need to rebuild the drive, just force a trim.)

See https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/26866906/

I believe that you can still force a disk-wide trim operation on your main disk (without using third party software) if you either:

1. Boot into single user mode with Command-S held down, then issue terminal command ‘fsck -y’ at the prompt. You should get a couple of lines of output, with one of the last ones stating that a TRIM operation has been run. Then issue ‘reboot’ to reboot back into GUI mode.

2. Boot into the Recovery Partition, and then run repair using the Disk Utility on your disk. If you expand to see the details you should see that the TRIM operation has been performed.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120114214648388

 

[AidenShaw]

issue terminal command ‘fsck -y’ at the prompt

In the link I posted, tsialex suggested 'fsck -fy' ...

 

[barmann]

Usually, an SSD will provide you with a much zippier experience. You should be able to identify in Activity Monitor, what is causing the lagginess. I can think of the following reasons:

1. indexing and rebuilding of caches (look for eg. mds in activity monitor) in which case the situation should improve after a while
2. Trim - usually, you should not have to tinker with the Trim settings. Either reverse your settings or start over again

That . It can take quite a while to get the indexing etc. done on a new system drive .
Have things improved yet ?

 

[flaubert]

Yes, I agree with -fy. Sorry, I was going by memory!

 

[TravelerJoe]

I ran "fsck -fy" in single user mode. Still very slow. I have 16GB of RAM. Indexing should be done by now.

Any other ideas? Thanks.

 

[tsialex]

I ran "fsck -fy" in single user mode. Still very slow. I have 16GB of RAM. Indexing should be done by now.

Any other ideas? Thanks.

Do you have a clone of your drive, no? Do a clean install into your SSD and check if you have the same problem, it's the first thing I'll do if the same happens to me.

 

[flaubert]

I’m with tsialex on this one: I think that there is something else going on here. Cloning the drive off to a backup, and then doing a totally clean install clean install (no migration assistant) should establish whether there is a hardware issue like a bad SATA channel or defective SSD. If the clean install works acceptably without beach balls, then you’re looking at some kind of software or malware. You could also try booting into Safe Mode (hold down Shift key during boot) to disable all third-party kexts for a session, just to see if the beach balls stop; if they do then you may be looking at some third party software installed that is interfering with normal operation. You could jump into investigating the malware angle by downloading and running Malwarebytes software; might be worth doing that anyway.

I’d be curious what Activity Monitor says about your current situation: is the memory pressure low and in the green? Are there any processes using more than 5-10% of the CPU at idle? In the disk tab, is there on-going disk activity even when no other programs (or only simple programs like TextEdit) are running? Are you running any anti-virus software?

Good luck!

 

[barmann]

Do you have a clone of your drive, no? Do a clean install into your SSD and check if you have the same problem, it's the first thing I'll do if the same happens to me.

The OP also mentioned he didn't do a fresh install of OSX , but cloned the old hard drive to the new one .

I've had issues with this method in the past, including poor performance .
So now I always do a fresh OSX install - with migration assistant for everything I need from the old drive - when I set up a new system drive .

 

[TravelerJoe]

The OP also mentioned he didn't do a fresh install of OSX , but cloned the old hard drive to the new one .

I've had issues with this method in the past, including poor performance .
So now I always do a fresh OSX install - with migration assistant for everything I need from the old drive - when I set up a new system drive .

To update, I finally did a clean install of OSX on the SSD. Reinstalled all software and copied my files. The speed upgrade of the SSD is now very noticeable. Not sure what happened, but the clone of the spinning disk to the SSD must have been the problem.

Thanks for all the suggestions.