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SSD performance of Macbook Air 2017
- Thread starter venko
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Does look a smidge on the slow side for that model, but a failing SSD doesn't have to relate to speed at all. It's more about stability and maintaining what you store on it. If EtreCheck says it's bad you should probably back up your data (which you already should've before as well of course)
You can try installing macOS to an external SSD and seeing how that runs for a while
You can try installing macOS to an external SSD and seeing how that runs for a while
That’s definitely subpar performance. However, as pointed out by @casperes1996 , performance is not a great gauge of HDD/SDD health.
I haven’t used EtreCheck. I do recommend installing DriveDx — it has a trial period:
binaryfruit.com
I haven’t used EtreCheck. I do recommend installing DriveDx — it has a trial period:
DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility
DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.
binaryfruit.com
After a short test, DriveDx believes my SSD is completely fine (all OK).That’s definitely subpar performance. However, as pointed out by @casperes1996 , performance is not a great gauge of HDD/SDD health.
I haven’t used EtreCheck. I do recommend installing DriveDx — it has a trial period:
DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility
DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.
Well; Did that work then?A very sound solution indeed, which I've already completed.
Yes, I have been using an external SSD for quite a while, but forgot to bring it on my vacation and was staggered at the slow performance.
EtreCheck does more than just check hard drive read and write speeds. It also runs a test here it creates and deletes a few hundred small files and directories. From the perspective of the file system, that's pretty much all that macOS does during the day.
The file system test is somewhat independent of mechanism. Back in the mechanical hard drive days, a good result on the file system test was 30 seconds. Modern SSDs can sometimes complete the test in under 10 seconds. Anything longer than 30 seconds is suspect. It was suspect a decade ago.
EtreCheck will terminate the test if it runs for more than 2 minutes. When this happens, it's an automatic "fail". Early Airs were statistically more likely to experience this kind of failure. Any kind of 3rd party system modification that does heavy file system work could be a potential culprit. There are a lot of those. I can't comment on any particular value or result because there is no way to tell that someone doesn't have 3 different AV apps, 3 different file sync apps, 2 app zappers, and 3 different "clean up" apps all running, in various states of disrepair.
The file system test is somewhat independent of mechanism. Back in the mechanical hard drive days, a good result on the file system test was 30 seconds. Modern SSDs can sometimes complete the test in under 10 seconds. Anything longer than 30 seconds is suspect. It was suspect a decade ago.
EtreCheck will terminate the test if it runs for more than 2 minutes. When this happens, it's an automatic "fail". Early Airs were statistically more likely to experience this kind of failure. Any kind of 3rd party system modification that does heavy file system work could be a potential culprit. There are a lot of those. I can't comment on any particular value or result because there is no way to tell that someone doesn't have 3 different AV apps, 3 different file sync apps, 2 app zappers, and 3 different "clean up" apps all running, in various states of disrepair.
Performance looks suspicously low to me and I would probably replace it if it was mine. You are fortunate in that model of laptop allows a drive replacement even if not with an off-the-shelf NVMe SSD. Your drive looks like it is running at 1/2 - 1/3rd expected while a new drive in that system should run ~ 2x faster than original (~1.5GB/sec).
Based on your other notes you are using an external drive as your boot drive as well as primary storage don't normally use this drive at all. So it's possible its been this slow for a while and/or this is actually normal. However, quick read of reviews of this laptop when it first came out suggest it normally did >1GB/sec read and >500MB/sec write. When hardware -- especially storage -- starts to slow down relative to new/normal, I become suspicious.
It helps then to isolate a potential hardware issue from a potential software issue. Since you aren't using it for your OS, etc I assume backing it up to your primary and overwriting it with a new filesystem wouldn't be hard? If so I would try that and then running the disk benchmarks again. If it returns to spec, probably wasn't a hardware issue. If you get errors during the process and/or performance is still low, I would replace it.
P.S.You should also run that disk benchmark on your primary external drive just to rule out other system issues that affect all drives and have a reference comparison. In theory your external drive shouldn't be any faster than the internal drive that came with that system. Maybe somewhat faster writes if your external drive is of a better model and Thunderbolt 2 connected.