Is my "Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB" defective (or just incompatible with MacBookPro5,5 Yosemite 10.10.2 - 13 inch mid-2009)

I loaded the Samsung 850 into my 2012 i5 Macbook Pro and it's been working well since I installed a few days ago. The only concern I have is that on boot up I get a white screen for around 30 seconds before it begins the startup with the apple and progress bar. That's odd, because when I installed an SSD on my older 2009 Macbook a few years ago that laptop booted up almost instantaneously when I pushed the power button.

I loaded the system on the SSD by cloning, rather than using Time Machine and it worked without a hitch. Used Carbon Copy Cloner in trial mode after formatting the SSD with Disk Utilities. Not sure if your problem may stem from using Time Machine. The cloning apps will usually adjust the data on the new drive based on available space, so if your SSB is a different size than the original HDD, it would automatically correct. Not sure about TIme Machine.

I'll keep researching about the startup lag when I turn on my Macbook Pro with the 850. Seems it should boot up right away with the SSD, but maybe it's because the 850 uses the new vertical stacking configuration. That's the only thing I can think of that's different from the last SSD I installed in my old Macbook.

I've had the same negative experience with my 850 EVO in a mid-2010 Macbook Pro (MacBookPro7,1). I managed, once, to work for most of a week after upgrading then lost everything to file system corruption. Multiple attempts to re-install the O/S (El Capitan) have all failed in similar ways. I've replaced the internal SATA cable (which is reported to be a common problem on the mid-2010 MBP) with no change in outcome. I have other SSDs around but am not keen on losing their contents while I experiment with them.

Installing the O/S with the drive connected with SATA worked once (the initial install, which took a half dozen tries before I succeeded) then became impossible; either the drive isn't recognized at all or the system powers off during reboot. I'm able to install with the drive on a USB adapter, no issues at all.

It seems, recently, that problems start after powering off the computer. Starting up with the drive connected with SATA, the computer immediately has trouble and eventually powers off after being unable to repair the disk (during one attempt I ran fsck manually, multiple times, in single user mode and all eventually failed; I don't think the problems are actually with the filesystem itself). Removing the SSD and attaching it via USB, even after a complete fail when connected internally with SATA, works fine; the drive is able to be checked, mounted, and accessed. Lots of files will have been dumped into lost+found from the failed disk repairs at boot time, however, so I'm back to square one and my original HD. When things go wrong they go seriously, irrevocably wrong.

Restarts after the install (without powering off) seem okay, and I'm able to restore from backups and work for a while. While running after the first install I did notice lots of long pauses that I now think were disk interface problems; beach ball and a ten second wait while everything was stuck.

I've been working on this for a couple weeks now and haven't found anything that helps. At this point I'm convinced the issue is with the SATA interface, but don't know what can be tweaked or tested on that front. I'm hoping a fix materializes in a firmware update for the SSD, or possibly from the mold growing in the back of my refrigerator.

I've put an 850 EVO in a mid-2009 MBP and am seeing the same symptoms.

The disk was originally installed by recovering a TM backup from an identically-sized previous installation. Despite shutting down correctly, I was often seeing fsck running at boot (I have set the OS to verbose boot all the time, so I see all the startup messages).

In order to rule out something 'bad' coming back from the TM restore, I bit the bullet and installed 10.11.0 from scratch, from a burned DVD. The install went normally but the frequency of fsck-on-boot did not decrease. In fact I've had two occasions now where fsck actually gave up and I had to restore a TM backup. I fear it's only a matter of time until fsck dies again and recovery also fails.

I can only imagine it's an incompatibility between the SATA controller and the disk, or something is going wrong with the O/S shutdown and the disk is not being unmounted correctly prior to shutdown occurring, causing it to be labelled as dirty during the next boot, and forcing fsck into recovery.

If anyone has a tweak to solve this I would dearly like to have it :-(

Samsung does not claim Mac compatibility on its own website. You are far from the first to report issues with Samsung Evos in Macs. OWC (macsales.com) sells SSDs that work with Macs, and I have used a Crucial for 2+ years without issues.

Livin Stephen Sharma wrote:

Is the Samsung 850 EVO not compatible with this MacBook Pro?

I will second steve359 post above. Reported issues are well known here.

I have the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 480GB, with TRIM enabled. Not a single issue. Used CCC.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan(10.11.2), i7 480GB SSD 16GB RAM iPhone5 iOS9.2, Parallels10.0.2

HI guys,

Thanks very much you two. I gave up - obviously there's something about the EVO and this SATA controller that causes filesystem corruption (suspect the cache is not being flushed on shutdown but I can't be bothered to do any more on this). I ordered a Crucial to replace it and I'm just backing up and inventorying everything for a clean install.

Thanks again,

J