Hey there,

today i downloaded Libre Office on my OS X Leopard system running on my PowerBook G4.
When i copied the large app file to my programs folder in OS X i got an average speed of 4MB/s.

Then i bootet into MorphOS and copied a large iso file from one SFS partition to another resulting in speeds around 15MB/s.

I think those values are way too low. Does anybody have those same problems? is there a way to trim or clean up the drive again to speed things up or do i have to make a fresh format of the drive?

It is a Transcend TS64GSSD25-M SSD with 64GB

Defrag maybe? How fast did it go before?

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Don't do that. Never defrag a SSD. It will only make it slower.

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Ah, I do that every week on my SSD! Never heard about not defraging an SSD!!!
Well my SSD is an OWC Mercury 256 GB and I get about 36 MB/s when copying form one SFS to another SFS partion. Hmmm...

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Generally, you get a tiny performance benefit at best when you defrag an SSD but you will certainly shorten your SSD´s life span due to excessive use.

Feel free to do an online search about the topic. This is pretty well documented.

i had >30MB/s too on my SSD when i first got my PowerBook, but now it just dropped down.

Is there anything i can do? All i read here in MZ about that topic was, that a speed loss won't be very likely due to the ess writing operations that morphos does and that an SSD still will be faster than any hd, no matter how much slower it gets.

Unfortunately, IDE SSDs are usually rather dated first-generation SSD devices, thus they include firmware implementations that lack a lot of the sophisticated features found in more modern PCIe / SATA SSDs (advanced garbage collection, etc). That said, even new models can exhibit severe performance degradation due to firmware bugs (which might or might not get fixed).

You may just have bought a specific model that, as it turns out, is a bit worse than other IDE SSDs during extended use.

So, yes, you may want to try formatting the disk. But chances are that you will run into similar issues again sooner or later.

in other words: as long as there's no trim support in morphos you'll have to reformat your drive sooner or later if you don't wanna lose performance.

FYI: I have a Transcend TS128GPSD330 in my MorphOS PowerBook for many years, and I use it almost everyday. I never had a single performance issue with the SSD (never defrag nor reformat either).

@ Cego

As far as I can tell, your drive does not even support TRIM.

Also, I would like to emphasize that it really depends on your exact drive (controller, firmware features) how much you benefit from TRIM support. In practice, the difference between a drive with enabled TRIM support and one without can be impossible to notice even after extended use.

If you do not mind the expense, you may want to look into a modern 1.8 inch SATA SSD and a SATA-to-IDE adapter / converter.

Given the extreme performance degradation as described in this thread, your drive could simply be failing or you discovered some severe firmware issues.

hmm ok. So formatting the drive would result in better speeds again? would it help to format just one partition to see if theres a performance gain or do i have to erase the whole disc? there is an unused 3GB partition i've never touched.

@ Cego

How much free space do you have on your drive right now?

this is how much free space is left on my MorphOS Partitions.

MorphOS: 12GB of 20GB
Work: 3,2GB of 15GB
Unused Partition: 3,85GB of 3,85GB, actually this one is not even a partition. it is just unused disk space.
OS X Partition: 5,5GB of 20GB

I have 24,55GB of free space out of a 64105MB Disk, which is about 62GB of disk space.

Here's a pic of my HDConfig

ur2gfyup.png

I also started to feel that my Intel 320 SATA SSD is slowing up. But that might just be my imagination.

So what are the general tips to keep an SSD going longer and better?

Is the SATA SSD adapter for PATA an ideal replacement for a MorphOS computer? I was planning on using an SSD if the original hard drive needs replacements. Is this a mistake?

> Is the SATA SSD adapter for PATA an ideal replacement for a MorphOS computer?

At least ASiegel's comment #11 reads this way.

> I was planning on using an SSD if the original hard drive needs replacements.
> Is this a mistake?

I can't think of a reason why it could be.

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Will it solve your problem? No idea. The degradation issue you describe is severe enough that it hints at either a model- or device-specific issue. Only people owning the same drive could investigate whether there are (temporary) remedies, hence my encouragement to at least try to reformat it (entirely) to see if it does anything.


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That should be plenty of free space. I was wondering if your disk was almost full but that is clearly not the case.

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The drive you noted above is almost twice as expensive as other SSD PATA drives of the same size. Is it worth twice the money to get the Transcend SSD, or should the KingSpec SSD be about the same in performance? Is there any way of telling before purchase, or is it just luck of the draw when buying SSD's, if no one else you know has not already tested the brand you are buying?

http://www.amazon.com/TRANSCEND-TS128GPSD330-PSD330-Internal-Solid/dp/B00GO4MCJI

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0091T4ZWU/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2/186-8050124-2370611?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_r=1V45AP2DZK1FFS8HX82K&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1944687662&pf_rd_i=B00GO4MCJI

After reading the reviews, the KingSpec SSD appears to have really bad reputation and the Transcend comes with a 3 year warranty. Maybe it is worth twice the price?

[ Edited by WB_Coder 13.01.2015 - 12:20 ]

If you want an up to date SSD and not want to pay the insane price for a small size go for a M-SATA drive, which basically is a drive in form of a small card.

There are also IDE to MSATA interfaces which fit these cards.

The result is even smaler than the original 2.5" ide drive of your system. It is perfect for PowerBooks, iBooks, Mac mini and even the Efika.

Back to topic:

If your SSD gets slower then it is

a) quite old
or
b) broken.

Modern SSDs are much faster even in worst case (misalignment, no trim support, 512 byte blocksize) than all the IDE hardware is out there supported by MorphOS. They never get slower than what our hardware is capable of.

Defragmentation however rearranges all data blocks so all blocks which belong to a single file are in line. This has no effect on SSDs, as there is no real connection between block number and position inside the flash chip. Also the seek time is mostly always the same. It just may be slower when a different flash chip gets addressed. Practically this is unnoticable as seek time (searching the next block of a file on the harddrive by moving the drive head and wait for the block to travel below the read head) is basically near zero (no mechanic parts inside an SSD), while with a real harddrive it may be several milliseconds. As already pointed out defragmentation an SSD increases the write counter of each block massivly and MUST BE AVOIDED.



[ Edited by geit 14.01.2015 - 01:46 ]

@Cego,

For sata ssd there exists hdderase. That needs a pc to connect the ssd inside when hdderase is launched to perform. Nevertheless I do not know if hdderase is able or not to handle ide ssd.

Have searches on google.

Brumiga

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In addition to shortening the lifespan of the drive, it might also make it slower (due to moving data around, "known-to-be-unused" block might get written new data moved from elsewhere, which results in both areas becoming "not known if used or not" (while only one is actually used).

The bottleneck (having to move drive head around the disk to find all parts of fragmented files) simply doesn't exist at all on SSD drives. There MIGHT be minimal speed decrease due to fragmentation anyway (caused by filesystem), but that will likely get much worse, if you try to "fix" that by defrag

As for the most optimal way for reformatting a partition, I think it could be formatted with "TRIM-supporting" OS (which marks the area unused), and then quick formatted on MorphOS (which, unlike full format, preserves much of the "unused" information)

Anyway, I'd probably just keep on using it as it is currently, and reformat only if I f.ex. want to change the filesystem.

And if you are really worried about reduced performance due to lack of trim, use f.ex. EXT2 filesystem, and occassionally boot to linux, and manually run commands to automatically "trim" all unused space. Also remember that the slowdown is caused by write operations, not read operations, so if you're not writing much data, it won't be making much difference.