SSD issues

Sam · June 29, 2012

Need some Mac help. No fries or drink, just help.

I installed an SSD drive (Mac Pro) and put my OS (Snow Leopard), and apps (LR, PS, etc) on it. I partitioned one drive into 2 sections. One for a scratch disc and one for documents and movies. The other two are set up as RAID 0. All drives are working well. I ran a disc speed app and strangely (to me) the scratch disc runs faster than the data disc which are both on the same physical HD. The Raid 0 array runs much faster than the scratch disk, and the SSD is way faster than that.

It boots up fine, loads and operates apps fine. I can put it to sleep during the day, and or go away for hours, come back, and the computer wakes up and is fine.

However each morning it will not wake up. The monitor will wake up but all I get is a spinning wheel. The wheel will move with the mouse initially but after a short time the wheel and arrow disappear and the only solution is to pull the plug and restart the computer.

The only thing that happens at night is my automatic backup (using Super Duper) from Raid 0 to an external RAID 1 array.
The log indicates the backup went fine.

I have tried running a manual back up during the day and have no issues.

Any ideas????

Sam

CatOne · June 29, 2012

It sounds to me like the system drive (which I assume is the SSD) isn't waking up properly. That can be the main source of the beachball... if the system is waiting on the disk and the disk isn't responding, it will beachball forever. You could try firing up the console application after a reboot and looking at the logs to see what's going on. Doing this right after a reboot should shed some light on it.

Note depending on the SSD it could be a firmware issue. 3rd party SSDs can be an issue, and except for the OWC ones it may be very difficult to get a firmware updater for them as the firmware updaters don't work on a Mac.

A note on your scratch disk vs video disk issue: That's what I would expect. A spinning hard drive is much faster at the outside than on the inside (areal density, physics, etc.). The difference can be 30% or more. So the partition you created first is likely the outside which would be the faster partition. Note also that putting the scratch disk and documents/movies on the same disk won't really help things from a performance perspective, if they are competing for the disk (it's the same physical disk). So if you're doing work in Photoshop, don't be accessing documents or movies :-)

Sam · June 30, 2012

CatOne,

Thanks, I have all my photo images on the Raid array so no problems there. I haven't really done anything with video so I'm not concern about that at this time.

I did buy the SSD from OWC so I will give them a call on Monday.

Sam

Sam · June 30, 2012

Seymore wrote: »

Sam, I would suggest disabling the nightly backup and seeing if this changes the morning behavior at all. It may not, but just another part of troubleshooting. Eliminate any variables...

I've also seen firmware updates affect performance and other factors. Good luck. Hope you find the fix.

This was on my list, but since I never had any issue before and it was backing up fine I wanted try other things first.

This morning the computer magically woke up just fine. The only setting I changed was in Supper Duper where one of the settings asks what to do after the backup is complete. I had it set to do nothing, but since the computer woke up just fine during the day from sleep mode I changed the setting to put computer to sleep.

It seems to have fixed the issue.

Sam

Sam · June 30, 2012

Update: After 4 hours or so asleep it appeared to wake up with the wallpaper and desktop icons, but the computer was frozen? So not fixed.

Sam

RevLinePhoto · July 1, 2012

You could have it shut down instead of going into sleep mode that should start the whole boot process for you.

SSD issues

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