Vertex / '09 Macbook Pro slowdown

[vbuggy]

I lent one of my '09 MBP's to a colleague for about a year, and it's just come back. I've noticed it's dramatically slower than my regular machines. It has a first-gen Vertex 250Gb.

I've taken out the Vertex and booted one of my other '09 MBP's from it, and I've confirmed that the culprit seems to be the Vertex.

I've upgraded the firmware to current, but if anything it seems slower - in both OS X and Windows (BC partition, 7), but to a greater degree in Windows I think. And furthermore, no matter what I do I can't get the Vertex Garbage Collection utility to run (just skips past all the drives).

All of my other '09 Macbook Pro's have Vertexes in them, and I suspect the reason I haven't come across this problem yet is because I don't use them every day. However it's been brought home to me that I could come across this problem on my other machines in the future, so I would definitely like to get to the bottom of this.

Any ideas?

EDIT: The full horror story, just ran XBench:

Sequential
Uncached Write (4K) - 1.84MB/Sec
Uncached Write (256K) - 1.82MB/Sec
Uncached Read (4K) - 0.73MB/Sec
Uncached Read (256K) - 84.22MB/Sec

Random
Uncached Write (4K) - 5.37MB/Sec
Uncached Write (256K) - 13.38MB/Sec
Uncached Read (4K) - 0.65MB/Sec
Uncached Read (256K) - 34.12MB/Sec

(I gave up waiting in Crystalmark to get the tests to initialise)

 

[Kaido]

Holy buckets, that's terrible!

The only SSD I know of that is "OK" to work with Macs long-term (other than Apple's own) is Sandforce 1200. That includes the Vertex 2. So maaaaaaaaybe that's the issue. But, it sort of sounds like either (1) the drive is bad, or (2) the Macbook doesn't like the drive anymore (EFI update, perhaps?) since you've tried both the garbage collection without good results and you've run both Windows and OSX.

Do you have another machine you can test the drive in, perhaps a PC desktop? And do you have a regular 2.5" hard drive you can swap into your laptop to test?

 

[vbuggy]

Actually, I haven't been able to get the garbage collection to work.

It just skips the drive.

 

[TheStu]

I haven't been able to afford to switch to SSDs yet, but doesn't a full format 'reset' them or something? Since OS X doesn't support TRIM, I think I heard that was a workaround, albeit an incredibly annoying one.

 

[vbuggy]

Ok, panic over. Freed up as much disk space in both partitions as I could then finally managed to get GC working. Now back in the 200's for read / 150's for write.

 

[Kaido]

Ok, panic over. Freed up as much disk space in both partitions as I could then finally managed to get GC working. Now back in the 200's for read / 150's for write.

So maybe garbage collection requires a certain amount of free disk space to run?

Odd that it slowed down - maybe because it's not a self-maintaining model. I have a 50GB OWC SF1200 SSD and have filled it up to less than 1GB and still maintain good speeds. Hum.

 

[TheStu]

Ok, panic over. Freed up as much disk space in both partitions as I could then finally managed to get GC working. Now back in the 200's for read / 150's for write.

What was the cutoff?

 

[vbuggy]

Well - first of all both partitions were about 75% occupied and when I managed to eventually run GC for the first time, I was getting in the 140/80. An improvement, but obviously far from the original. So I freed it up to more like 50% and ran GC again. That brought the near-original figures back.

 

[vbuggy]

So maybe garbage collection requires a certain amount of free disk space to run?

Odd that it slowed down - maybe because it's not a self-maintaining model. I have a 50GB OWC SF1200 SSD and have filled it up to less than 1GB and still maintain good speeds. Hum.

It's probably the age as well. I don't know how long you've had it, but this is an early '09 unibody 17" - and the Vertexes were all fitted in April/May '09. These are the oldest SSD's I have, and these are the oldest machines of either desk/laptop I have.

How I use notebooks is that I buy several of each of the same type in each notebook category I use and have them distributed around the various places I work, so they're not used every day - and I use them in bursts when I'm at the place where the particular notebook in question is at.

But in about September last year I lent out this machine, and AFAIK it has been her daily - so it's seen 6 months of relatively light use by someone who knows exactly what he's doing with regular maintenance, then 12 months of relatively heavy OS X / Windows use by someone who doesn't know what she's doing.

FW 1.6 is supposed to be self maintaining if what I read is correct, so we'll see what happens. I intend to hang onto these machines until they have to be replaced, since my OS X luggable use isn't going to need any increase in power.