SSD hall of fame needs new entries

[vit9696]

Guide Anti-Hackintosh Buyers Guide (link)

After our discovery of a severe bug in the TRIM implementation of practically all Samsung SSDs we spent time investigating which SSDs are affected by all kinds of issues, and so far came with several names worth mentioning.

Working with TRIM broken (can be used with TRIM disabled, at slower boot times, or as a data storage):

• Samsung 950 Pro
• Samsung 960 Evo/Pro
• Samsung 970 Evo/Pro

Working fine with TRIM:

• Western Digital Blue SN550
• Western Digital Black SN700
• Western Digital Black SN720
• Western Digital Black SN750 (aka SanDisk Extreme PRO)
• Western Digital Black SN850
• Intel 760p (including OEM models, e.g. SSDPEMKF512G8)
• Crucial P1 1TB NVME (SM2263EN) (need more tests)

Working fine with TRIM (SATA):

• SATA PLEXTOR M5Pro
• SATA Samsung 850 PRO (need more tests)
• SATA Samsung 870 EVO (need more tests)

Working fine with TRIM (Unbranded SSDs):

• KingDian S280
• Kingchuxing 512GB

Incompatible with IONVMeFamily (die under heavy load):

• GIGABYTE 512 GB M.2 PCIe SSD (e.g. GP-GSM2NE8512GNTD) (need more tests)
• ADATA Swordfish 2 TB M.2-2280
• SK Hynix HFS001TD9TNG-L5B0B
• SK Hynix P31
• Samsung PM981 models
• Micron 2200V MTFDHBA512TCK
• Asgard AN3+ (STAR1000P)
• Netac NVME SSD 480

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There are several very good comparison charts containing various SSDs and their controllers: one, two. Since SSD compatibility usually is controller-based, picking up an SSD with a known to be compatible controller has a high compatibility chance as well.

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In addition to that, I would like more people to run tests on their platforms to determine whether their SSD TRIM implementation is broken or not.

Preconditions:

• Tested SSD is the boot SSD (i.e. macOS is installed on it).
• Tested SSD is APFS-formatted.
• Tested SSD must be actively used with macOS installation being at least a month old.
• OpenCore 0.6.7 or newer is used.

The idea is to measure the boot time either between motherboard logo and macOS login screen or between Apple logo and macOS login screen. The former is strongly recommended due to possible GOP issues. All the measurements needs to be done with different SetApfsTrimTimeout values set in OpenCore. Each measurement must be made at least 2 or 3 three times to ensure no sporadic results. The values to test are as follows:

1. 0 (means TRIM is disabled)
2. -1 (standard timeout, equals roughly 10 seconds, means TRIM is enabled and runs up 10 seconds during boot)
3. 4294967295 (maximum timeout, TRIM is enabled and runs as long as needed)

• An SSD with a decent TRIM implementation should behave as follows. Value 1 will be negligibly the fastest. Value 2 might be slightly slower than 2 (way less than by 10 seconds, maybe 2-5). Value 3 should be equal to value 2.
• An SSD with a broken TRIM implementation, like Samsung, will have value 2 slower than value 1 by 10 seconds, and value 3 will be noticeably slower than value 2, usually by 30-60 seconds.

Please write include the following information in the report:

• SSD type (NVMe or SATA), model, and storage size
• Motherboard and CPU used
• macOS version used
• Test results grouped in 3 sections (a total of 6 or 9 values).

Note: If you use FileVault 2, you can use sudo fdesetup authrestart command to skip UEFI login. AuthRestart must of course be enabled. I would also advise to disable the OpenCore Picker (ShowPicker = NO).

[Romanychev]

Gigabyte Z490i Aorus Ultra + 10900k
11.3 Beta (20E5229a)
Samsung 970 Evo NVME:

1. 18, 17, 18.
2. 29, 30, 30.
3. 97, 85, 86

[Bustycat]

Crucial BX500 120GB SATA 2.5-inch
GA-H61M-S2PV + i5-2500K
11.3.1 (20E241)

1. 31 30 30
2. 39 44 40
3. 46 42 41

(sudo trimforce enable)

From the motherboard logo to macOS system, pressing Enter immediately at OpenCore menu.

[Bustycat]

WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe
Z370 AORUS Gaming 3 + i5-9600K
11.3.1 (20E241)

1. 20 20 20
2. 34 33 32
3. 36 37 37

From Apple logo to macOS system.

[Bustycat]

Crucial MX500 500GB SATA 2.5-inch
MacBookPro9,2 + i5-3210M
11.3.1 (20E241)

1. 39 37 39
2. 41 42 45
3. 45 46 46

(sudo trimforce enable)

From Apple logo to macOS system.

[Edhawk64]

Samsung SM951 256GB NVME (MZVPV256HDGL-00000)
Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H, +i7-4790K, iMac 15,1
10.15.7 (19H1030)

1. 22.90, 22.82, 23.29
2. 27.46, 26.77, 26.43
3. 27.10, 26.62, 26.33

From gigabyte splash screen to macOS Login screen (used stopwatch on iPhone to time each run)
Pressing Enter immediately at OC GUI.

[thomas22122212]

Samsung 830 256GB SATA SSD

Asus P9X79WS + Xeon E5-2667v2 + 64GB ECC + MacPro6,1 SMBIOS
macOS 11.3.1 + OpenCore 0.6.9

Time in seconds from pressing enter in OC-Picker to login screen:

sudo trimforce disable:

1. 23, 21, 22

sudo trimforce enable (SetApfsTrimTimeout={999, -1, 4294967295}):

1. 32, 31, 32
2. 42, 42, 41
3. 45, 44, 44

I expected 'trimforce disable' and 'trimforce enable' with 'SetApfsTrimTimeout:999' to be approximately equal. Why isn't that the case? 🤔

[telepati]

HideAuxiliary Enabled, ShowPicker, and Timeout Disabled. (I always use it this way.)

ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB NVMe
ASUS TUF Z390-Plus Gaming + Intel 9900K
11.4 Beta (20F5055c) iMac 19,1

1. (43, 45, 46)
2. (46, 47, 48)
3. (53, 54, 55)

It is always slow in any case. There is only one OS in this Build.

[th0u]

Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SATA
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro / i7-9700K
11.3.1 / iMac 19,1

Times taken between Apple Logo and Login Screen

1. 15, 15, 15
2. 18, 19, 19
3. 18, 18, 18

[aluveitie]

Corsair MP600 1TB NVMe
Asus ROG Strix X570-I / Ryzen 9 3950X
11.4 Beta / MacPro7,1

1. 23 24 24
2. 28 27 27
3. 27 27 28

[dreamwhite]

I don't know if you'll ever consider the following, but apparently many models of Phison E12 (like Sabrent Rocket NVMe 3.0 TLC 64 layers NAND) have a broken trim support and are going to failure of the disk.
In less than 1 year, I wrote just 5.2 TB of data for my 512GB model and the drive estimated life was 94%.
According to Sabrent TBW warranty, the 500GB 3.0 TLC model should have 800TBW of life which is a joke.

Please avoid buying NVMes with Phison E12 controller.
I opted for a WD Black SN750 and it works flawlessly both with and without TRIM ^^

[antoniomcr96]

Crucial P2 CT500P2SSD8
Lenovo L390 Yoga with i5-8265U / Big Sur 11.4 / MacBookPro 15,2

1. 22 22,3 21,5
2. 30,9 31 31,3
3. 32,1 31,9 32,20

About 10 seconds more with trim enabled

[naveenkrdy]

DELL XPS 7590 FHD | i7 9750-H | HP SSD EX920 512GB
macOS BigSur 11.4 | MacBookPro16,1 | OpenCore 0.6.9

1. 24 25
2. 27 27
3. 27 27

Testing done from POST logo to macOS login screen