General NVMe Drive Problems (Fatal)

[kentval]

All of this discussion is anecdotal, as is this: I have the Samsung EVO 970 as my boot. I installed 12.1 yesterday. My cold boot time ("cold" = machine is OFF) to the finder desktop used to be 2:12.
Now it's 2:45.
I don't really consider that "fatal" or worth spending the $$ and energy to replace the drive.

Just adding a data point; YMMV.

 

[trs96]

I don't really consider that "fatal" or worth spending the $$ and energy to replace the drive.

It may keep growing longer as you add more data. Some people with Samsung NVMe drives are having 7-8 minute boot times and feel that they can't tolerate that. They switch to a different brand of drive and get boot times under 30 seconds. Everyone has a different tolerance level. Not everyone reboots their hack as frequently. That makes longer boot times not such a big deal.

 

[trs96]

Any changes after updating to the 12.1 OSx version?

I doubt that anything Apple changes in Monterey will make a difference. They only test it with the NVMe drives that go into Macs, not drives such as the Samsung 970/980 NVMe that have TRIM issues when formatted as APFS drives.

All Macs with NVMe blade SSDs since around 2018 have soldered to the PCB, non-replaceable NVMe drives. They don't want end users to replace them with their own non-Apple branded NVMe drives. It just leads to more support cases that they don't want to deal with. If everyone buying a new MBP bought the smallest NVMe drive and then put their own larger capacity Samsung drive in because it's cheaper, guess how many people would be calling their Apple store due to super long boot times ? They'd say, "My MBP boots too slow. It's still under Apple Care warranty, fix this."

 

[UtterDisbelief]

All of this discussion is anecdotal, as is this: I have the Samsung EVO 970 as my boot. I installed 12.1 yesterday. My cold boot time ("cold" = machine is OFF) to the finder desktop used to be 2:12.
Now it's 2:45.
I don't really consider that "fatal" or worth spending the $$ and energy to replace the drive.

Just adding a data point; YMMV.

Hi there.

I think the point being made in this thread (on the whole) isn't the raw boot times as such, but that some Samsung users have discovered their boot times jumping from perhaps less than a minute with Big Sur to well over 5-minutes with Monterey.

Clearly a technical issue they are keen to resolve.

 

[trs96]

perhaps less than a minute with Big Sur to well over 5-minutes with Monterey.

Even old platter drives can boot macOS faster than that, few people want that experience in 2021. It's taking a step backwards. This thread also helps people trying to choose a new drive for a build make an informed choice.

 

[c-o-pr]

Update on 980 Pro

Samsung offered a firmware update this month which I installed (via Windows).

Now macOS boot stalls for a couple minutes with intense drive activity.

Everything seems to work fine thereafter.

So I imagine (guess) that Apple issues Trim of all drive space at boot which the drive now doesn't ignore or back-burner. I have to wait for it to be processed.

If this is true... Idk... It means that we sacrifice a very noticeable glitch
of bad performance for wear mgmt?

As to which I might prefer, the whole thing seems daft.

 

[c-o-pr]

I doubt that anything Apple changes in Monterey will make a difference. They only test it with the NVMe drives that go into Macs

Moreover we should expect that a the richest company in the world that creates industry leading 50-billion transistor systems-on-chips and controls the entire stack in a perfectly vertical ownership paradigm with drives soldered in can arrange to make its hard drives work any way they want.

It's past time to let go of quaint idea that Macs are merely luxury PCs sourced from same bins.

 

[pastrychef]

Moreover we should expect that a the richest company in the world that creates industry leading 50-billion transistor systems-on-chips and controls the entire stack in a perfectly vertical ownership paradigm with drives soldered in can arrange to make its hard drives work any way they want.

It's past time to let go of quaint idea that Macs are merely luxury PCs sourced from same bins.

If you don't like they way they make their Macs, no one is forcing you to buy one.

 

[tedyun]

If you don't like they way they make their Macs, no one is forcing you to buy one.

And this is why I Hackintosh....

My last true Mac was a PowerPC G4 tower.

Eventually, when all my MacOS programs are no longer compatible with my Hack, I'll get the AppleSi. I'm hoping it won't be until they release the quad M10X+ Pro based systems.

"One Apple Way" isn't the address of their HQ ....

 

[c-o-pr]

If you don't like they way they make their Macs, no one is forcing you to buy one.

My point isn't that Apple is doing anything wrong — far from it. My point is that hackintosh community has to face that a commodities NVMe SSD cannot be assumed to agreeable with macOS because Apple may have its own idea of what a feature such as Trim actually does baked into the firmware for the drives it sources.

I say this because I see there's a common POV here that hackintosh's are just specially enabled PCs, but from a hack-user's practical point of view that's certainly changed in the last couple years, and from Apple's POV has never been true.

So I'm saying something about hackintosh user expectations, which is the whole reason for starting this thread.