[Solved] AFPS "slower" and TRIM

[Strik9]

Hi,

I unfortunately updated my system without paying attention and it's now in APFS. I can't mesure it, but it seems slower. Opening programs, PDF, etc. seems to take much time.
My SSD is a Samsung 840 pro quite old but with really good performance for a SATA drive.
I didn't forced trim as I've read somewhere it was not the best idea to force trim with a non Apple SSD. I'm wondering if it could be this. I didn't find it slow when I installed the system.

Did someone also notice this?

Best

EDIT 06/05/2018 :
It was much better with Trim Enabled almost 450mb/s 500mb/s like it was with hfs+ BUT and it's a big BUT after 2 month I had difficulties to access my desktop it was loading and then rebooting in the middle of starting up my startup program. I manage to boot, and disable TRIM.

I'm going to update to 10.13.5 to see if there's any difference.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi,

I unfortunately updated my system without paying attention and it's now in APFS. I can't mesure it, but it seems slower. Opening programs, PDF, etc. seems to take much time.
My SSD is a Samsung 840 pro quite old but with really good performance for a SATA drive.
I didn't forced trim as I've read somewhere it was not the best idea to force trim with a non Apple SSD. I'm wondering if it could be this. I didn't find it slow when I installed the system.

Did someone also notice this?

Best

Hello

This happened to me so I re-installed and used the script to force HFS instead.

Also I turned-off Trim (which I had previously set with: sudo trimforce enable etc) because after checking the manufacturers specs for the SSD I discovered it has its own trim and garbage-collection routines built in. Without forcing Apple trim I have had no problems so far and no speed penalties either.

I think Apple only implemented APFS on SSDs because it is a slower system.

Maybe an expert can clarify.

 

[Strik9]

Actually I enabled TRIM, and enabling it makes my boot slower but performance are back even if not perfect...

With Black Magic Speed Test with TRIM disabled it was 10mb/s write (yes 10mb/s...) and 300mb/s read. Now, with TRIM enabled it's 200mb/s write and 500mb/s read. It should be faster, it was with El Capitan HFS+J (450/500).

My SSD is a Samsung 840 pro 256mb.

Lately, I moved a lot of files on my system probably 1To in a couple of days (archiving files) which is probably why the performances where so much degraded.

This guy seems to have the same problem as I did : http://www.martinzimelka.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2015/4/8_Samsung_840_Pro_really_needs_TRIM.html

So far, no bugs reported (but boot is slower...) . I'm on 10.13.4

 

[Strik9]

Just for feedbacks.

After 4 days with TRIM enabled, my SSD is as fast as news. Today Blackmagic Disk test tells me my ssd speed is 400W/500R. It's almost there.
Conclusion for me, with a Samsung 840 pro, it's better enable TRIM in AFPS. Boot is slower, put I didn't notice any bugs yet.

 

[GeraldB]

What could help you to have a quicker boot is to use apfs.efi from first High Sierra build10.13.0. I do that on my build too because of that I have 3 disks in my build. When I use later builds of apfs.efi the startup takes ca. 5 seconds longer. As this driver is only used to get access to the filesystem from Clover boot it's not important to have the latest version. It just works faster. You can find the versions here: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/how-to-update-current-and-past-apfs-efi-downloads.236103/

 

[vulgo]

What could help you to have a quicker boot is to use apfs.efi from first High Sierra build10.13.0. I do that on my build too because of that I have 3 disks in my build. When I use later builds of apfs.efi the startup takes ca. 5 seconds longer. As this driver is only used to get access to the filesystem from Clover boot it's not important to have the latest version. It just works faster. You can find the versions here: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/how-to-update-current-and-past-apfs-efi-downloads.236103/

I might try this. Have seen the APFS driver complains about the 'jump start' info not being as expected when mounting root, and mounting root is slower than the earlier releases. So i extracted the jump start EFI driver from a current firmware.scap - but no difference having Clover load that as well. Have heard that Apple hardware is also slow booting with third party SSDs.

 

[GeraldB]

I might try this. Have seen the APFS driver complains about the 'jump start' info not being as expected when mounting root, and mounting root is slower than the earlier releases. So i extracted the jump start EFI driver from a current firmware.scap - but no difference having Clover load that as well. Have heard that Apple hardware is also slow booting with third party SSDs.

The same happened to me with jumpstart info on newer builds of apfs.efi. Also it seems that the driver scans for Fusion drives. I don't use Fusion drive but still have a legacy harddrive in my setup just for use with Timemachine. If there would be a way to tell the driver to not scan for Fusion drives may be that would be a solution too. But for now I use the first version of apfs.efi and have had no problems with it. It boots like a champ .

 

[vulgo]

The same happened to me with jumpstart info on newer builds of apfs.efi. Also it seems that the driver scans for Fusion drives. I don't use Fusion drive but still have a legacy harddrive in my setup just for use with Timemachine. If there would be a way to tell the driver to not scan for Fusion drives may be that would be a solution too. But for now I use the first version of apfs.efi and have had no problems with it. It boots like a champ .

Installed the 10.13.0 apfs.efi - still seeing a ~20 second delay (vs trim disabled) when spaceman_trim_free_blocks is called during boot...

kernel: (apfs) spaceman_trim_free_blocks:3009: scan took 22.135365 s, trims took 2.473445 s

To be fair the default is no TRIM on third-party SSDs (probably not because of slow boot times though). Is the 20 second scan even part of TRIM?

 

[GeraldB]

TRIM is a different story. If your drive doesn't support TRIM it will indeed give an extra timeout. Also with apfs.efi from 10.3.0. I have had this with an Intel 520 which has a Sandforce controller. That controller has it's own TRIM mechanism. That jumpstart entry has nothing to do with TRIM.

 

[RehabMan]

To be fair the default is no TRIM on third-party SSDs (probably not because of slow boot times though). Is the 20 second scan even part of TRIM?

TRIM is default on NVMe SSDs regardless of Apple branding or not.