Slow boot on Mac Pro

I enabled TRIM and it didn't make a difference. Thanks for the tip though, should have been enabled. Perhaps lack of TRIM is what made my old SSD slow as molasses.

I also took out all of the 16GB memory sticks thinking maybe it didn't like the larger size. I believe the stated max memory for the Mac Pro is 64GB, but it will take 96 or 128 with 16GB sticks. It was no faster with only 8GB sticks in it.

I also verified that it has the latest EFI version.

I also tried pulling out all the internal drives - no help.

The timing is also worse than I thought. It often takes 2-3 minutest to get to the login screen.

Looks like it may be an issue with my Crucial M500 SSD:

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Long-boot-time-in-MacPro-and -SSD-M500/td-p/128210

I'll try cloning to a hard drive and see if it changes anything.

Thank for the info. That probably explains why my old SSD was slow as heck. The one I have now is brand new so I don't think it drowning in deleted blocks. Still has quite a bit of space free.

However, when I ran a disk utility repair on the old one mounted in an external ESATA dock, it didn't give the message Trimming unused blocks". Would that have to be an internal SATA drive for that to happen or should it happen in an ESATA dock as well?

I did enable TRIM on my system using Chameleon, so the new SSD has been running with TRIM enabled. And it is pretty fast. I believe the Mac Pro has SATA II and I am getting 300-ish speeds (if I recall correctly) under Black Magic speed test.

I'm still waiting to reboot with the Crucial firmware update CD to see if updating the firmware reduces the slow boot time. The thread posted above seems to indicate people have had succes with this and the Crucial M500 drive has a particular problem with Mac Pro's, and perhaps other Macs.

By the way, would the deleted blocks issue cause slowness in both reads and writes? On my old SSD (a Samsung 256GB) I am getting on the order of 10MB/s write and 75MB/s read. Pathetic.

Enabling TRIM for a specific Drive makes a change in Mac OS X, not in the drive or the Driver that is loaded off the drive. In order to effect the Big TRIM, you would need to have ALSO Installed and Enabled TRIM for that drive on your alternate Mac OS X. TRIM cannot be Installed in a Recovery_HD (at least, not yet).

I actually ran it on a TRIM enabled system - i.e., the system now has a new Crucial M500 SSD in it for which I enabled TRIM (i.e. enabled TRIM in OSX after I realized I needed to). I then plugged the old SSD into an ESATA dock and then did the disk repair where I was hoping to see the message "Trimming unused blocks."

Is there any way to force the trimming (or garbage collection) to happen? If I simply leave the drive in the drive in the ESATA dock for a while will the garbage collection occur? Will erasing the drive or reformatting it fix the deleted block problem?

Thanks for all the good info BTW.

I did first check with Chamelion and when that older SSD was selected, it did indicate the TRIM was enabled for it.

Long story short, my old SSD is a Samsung PM800 that was originall in Dell computer (as I discovered). Samsung has a nifty tool to reset an SSD and zero out all the blocks (and thus greatly improve the writ times) but it won't recognize the Dell SSD's as they have a custom firmware.

Managed to reset the SSD using a gparted live CD and these instructions:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=841182

http://peter.membrey.hk/2011/09/11/secure-erase-wiki-no-long-available-instructi ons-on-how-to-securely-erase-your-ssd/

Now back to the task of updating the Crucial M500 SSD firmware to see if that fixes the long wait at boot time. I'm also going to clone the boot disk onto a normal hard drive and see if that shows the same problem; if not, it is defintely the SSD.

Lastly, noticed that using the Chamelion SSD tool, it will recognize the drive as an SSD if I have it connected via ESATA but not if I have it connected via a SATA-USB adapter. Makes sense, really.

No luck updating my M500 Crucial SSD to the new MU03 firmware. Others have seen this updated solve their slow boot problem but mine still boots just as slowly, including the very long pause before I see anything on the screen or hear the chime.

One other thing that occured to me is that my SSD is attached to the SATA connector that is on the same wire harness as the DVD-RW drive. My 4 drive bays are all filled up with 2GB disks in a stripped configuration (large backup disk for external ESATA drives). Could this connector be inherantly slower for boot than if it was in one of the drive bays?

I tried some more stuff with no luck:

- Switched to the other socket of the wire harness the boot drive was attached to (the one that was on the DVD-RW).

- Replace SSD with a standard WD hard drive

- Put the SSD in one of the 4 internal bays

- Put the WD hard drive in oen of the 4 internal bays.

No matter what, it takes about a minute and a half until it appears to start booting in earnest.

I'm out of ideas. Seems to be something I can't figure out that is causing the boot delay.

Yes, meant 2TB not 2GB drives in the internal drive bayes in a striped configuration. I know the striped config is not the safest (I lost 3 out of 4 drives in one fell swoop last year) but as long as I don't lose both my data drives and my backup at the same time, I should be Ok. plus, I frequently backup to external drives for added safety.

I've tried removing the PCIe cards that are being used for the eSATA storage (the performance ***** with a Drobo BTW) but this made no difference in the boot time. But, I did try it before I updated the SSD BIOS so perhaps there were two things going on.