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User profile for user: MarkPTrueman
MarkPTrueman Author
User level: Level 1
5 points

Spinning wheel after installing Crucial BX500 1TB SSD on 2017 Retina iMac

Hi


After finding that the standard drive in my Retina 5K mid 2017 (18,3 - A1419) was failing, I took the plunge and replaced it with a Crucial BX500 1TB SSD (CT1000BX500SSD1)


However, since doing this, I have been getting a lot of hangs with spinning rainbow wheels that are making the system unusable. Sometimes it can take over a minute for the system to recover from a hang, only to jump into a new one as soon as you try to do something else. I've tried another external SSD (Samsung) with both MacOS and Windows 10 on it and they seem to perform really well so i'm pretty convinced that the problem is with the Crucial SSD. In all likelyhood there is something i have done incorrectly in setting this up as i wouldn't expect a brand new Crucial SSD to fail. Disk checks in Disc Manager have come back with nothing out of the ordinary.


I'm not sure where to start investigating if there is a problem caused by my setup. I just did a standard APFS partition on the drive, installed the latest OS and set it as the boot disk. Even with only chrome installed, the system is unusable. Ive tried a few different OS versions and all exhibit the same issue on this specific disk.


Can anyone help me diagnose and fix this issue?


Thanks


Mark


Posted on Nov 29, 2022 11:18 AM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,284 points

Posted on Nov 30, 2022 9:58 AM

Unfortunately the BX500 SSD is a piece of junk. Crucial should be embarrassed to even make it. The BX500 is a low end budget economy model that can be as slow as a hard drive especially after writing GBs of data such as during an OS install. It can take a while for the SSD to recover its performance after writing GBs of data in a short period of time. If you perform any writes that exceed about 30-40 seconds, then you will have filled the SSD's write cache and hit the very slow TLC NAND. I thought I killed one of these BX500 SSDs the first time this happened since the performance took so long to recover after I ran a stress test on it. You can try Option Booting the iMac and letting it sit on the Apple boot picker menu for a few hours which may allow the SSD's internal maintenance routines to run and bring the SSD back into line again.


Personally I would do as @den.thed suggests and get the MX500 SSD. The MX500 SSD is a better quality SSD with better maintenance routines & configuration. I find the BX500 SSDs tend to over heat very easily which will then throttle the SSD's speed until the temperature drops again. Plus I find the BX500 SSDs have a much higher rate of failure....they will just drop dead with no warning. We never have these problems with the MX500 SSDs our organization has used.


FYI, many of todays SATA SSDs are just low end models with questionable performance. It can be difficult to distinguish between them and the better quality & performing SATA SSDs.

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,284 points

Nov 30, 2022 9:58 AM in response to MarkPTrueman

Unfortunately the BX500 SSD is a piece of junk. Crucial should be embarrassed to even make it. The BX500 is a low end budget economy model that can be as slow as a hard drive especially after writing GBs of data such as during an OS install. It can take a while for the SSD to recover its performance after writing GBs of data in a short period of time. If you perform any writes that exceed about 30-40 seconds, then you will have filled the SSD's write cache and hit the very slow TLC NAND. I thought I killed one of these BX500 SSDs the first time this happened since the performance took so long to recover after I ran a stress test on it. You can try Option Booting the iMac and letting it sit on the Apple boot picker menu for a few hours which may allow the SSD's internal maintenance routines to run and bring the SSD back into line again.


Personally I would do as @den.thed suggests and get the MX500 SSD. The MX500 SSD is a better quality SSD with better maintenance routines & configuration. I find the BX500 SSDs tend to over heat very easily which will then throttle the SSD's speed until the temperature drops again. Plus I find the BX500 SSDs have a much higher rate of failure....they will just drop dead with no warning. We never have these problems with the MX500 SSDs our organization has used.


FYI, many of todays SATA SSDs are just low end models with questionable performance. It can be difficult to distinguish between them and the better quality & performing SATA SSDs.

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User profile for user: samtenor
samtenor
User level: Level 4
1,768 points

Nov 29, 2022 2:33 PM in response to MarkPTrueman

First, have you tried EtreCheck to explore the snapshot of the system?


Not all SSD drives were created the same - in the mean time, 3rd party SSDs also have "firmware" to deal with before plug into Macs.

If you have the updated BX firmware - then you might want to switch to the different brand.


Additional note:

Unfortunately, update firmware process (3rd party SSD) has NOT been much Mac friendly, especially yours has been in the iMac..


Second thought:

External SSD via USB 3 -- might be another route you might consider.

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Spinning wheel after installing Crucial BX500 1TB SSD on 2017 Retina iMac

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