I replaced the stock hard disk in my Mac mini (2011, 2.3 GHz i5) with an Intel 510 (120 GB) SSD. In general, the SSD is working fine and it's very fast. HOWEVER, I am experiencing lock-ups where the current (front) application will hang (freeze) for about 10 to 20 seconds, usually with a 'spinning beach-ball' mouse pointer. Intel® Solid State Drive Toolbox version 3.5.7 is a drive management software that allows you to view SSD information, including firmware version, drive health, and more. Optimize Intel SSD performance using Trim functionality and Performance Boost feature. Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG) Software License Agreement. Intel NAND memory inside an Intel enterprise-class X-25E Extreme SATA SSD. Not all garbage collection (as the erasing used cells and consolidating data in an SSD’s NAND is known) is created equal.
- Possible Intel Ssd 25x-m Trim Solution For Machine
- Possible Intel Ssd 25x-m Trim Solution For Macbook Pro
Detailed description The Intel® Solid State Drive Toolbox (Intel® SSD Toolbox) is drive management software that allows you to:. View current drive information for Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSDs), including:. Model number, capacity and firmware version. Drive health. Estimated drive life remaining. SMART attributes (also available for hard disk drives and non-Intel SSDs). Identify Device information (also available for hard disk drives and non-Intel SSDs).
Optimize Intel SSD performance using Trim functionality and Performance Boost feature. NOTE: Trim feature intentionally disabled for Intel® Optane™ Memory - TRIM, or Optimize, is not necessary because of the Intel® Optane™ Memory Module architecture. NOTE: Performance Boost feature is available for ONLY Intel® 660p series drive.
Optimize Intel SSD performance in RAID 0 using Trim functionality Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) 11.0 or greater. NOTE: Trim on RAID 0 is not supported on Windows 8., Windows 8.1., Windows® 10, or Windows Server 2012. Obtain proactive notifications of new Intel SSD Toolbox software versions for Windows 7., Windows 8., Windows 8.1.
and Windows 10. systems. Update the firmware on supported Intel SSDs NOTE: If you purchased your Intel SSD from an OEM, your firmware version may have a different naming.
Contact your local OEM representative for latest firmware revisions. Run quick, full diagnostic scans to test read and write functionality NOTE: Diagnostic scans are intentionally disabled on Intel® Optane™ when system acceleration enabled. Check and tune system settings for optimal performance, power efficiency, and endurance. View system information and hardware configuration, such as central processing unit (CPU), chipset, controller name, and driver versions. Run Secure Erase on a secondary SATA Intel SSD in Windows 7. NOTE: Secure Erase functionality for SATA devices is blocked by the Windows 8., Windows 8.1.
and Windows® 10 operating systems. NOTE: Turn Off Drive Password Protection Some systems provide the ability to password-protect their drives. If your system has password protection enabled, the Intel SSD may reject any requests from the host to update the firmware. Turn off the drive password protection prior to beginning the Firmware update process.
Although it varies from system to system, you can usually find the Drive Password Protection feature located in the BIOS. Consult your system documentation for the BIOS settings and passwords. If you need help disabling the drive password protection feature, contact For Corporate customers who wish to use the Intel® SSD Toolbox for their internal corporate use, please download the IntelSSDToolboxv356.zip. While the software includes an embedded alternative license, the “NSGSoftwareLicenseAgreementEULAandCorporateEntity2018.docx” agreement included with the download applies. Please Note: Firmware update for the Intel® SSD 750 Series on Windows 7 and 8.1 requires the. For Windows 10 the Microsoft Native NVMe.
driver may be used. This release of the Intel® SSD Toolbox includes firmware update for: Intel® SSD E 6100p Series products, for latest firmware revision 004E. Additionally, this release also include support for Intel® SSD 800p Series products. Getting started Before beginning the Intel SSD Toolbox installation, review the Release Notes. The User’s Guide for the Intel® SSD Toolbox can be found. NOTE: Installing this version of the Intel SSD Toolbox overwrites previous versions of Intel SSD Toolbox. If you need assistance with the installation or experience issues, contact.
The terms of the software license agreement included with any software you download will control your use of the software. Copyright (c) Intel Corporation 2012 – 2015. All Rights Reserved. Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG) Software License Agreement IMPORTANT - READ BEFORE COPYING, INSTALLING OR USING.
Do not use or load this software or any associated materials or documentation (collectively, the 'Software') until You have carefully read the following terms and conditions. By loading or using the Software, You agree to the terms and conditions of this Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG) Software License Agreement (“Agreement”). If You do not agree to comply with the terms and conditions, do not install or use the Software. This Software is licensed for use only in conjunction with Intel solid state drive (SSD) products. Use of the Software in conjunction with non-Intel SSD products is not licensed hereunder. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Intel grants to You a nonexclusive, nontransferable, worldwide, fully paid-up license under Intel's copyrights to: a) copy the Software onto a single computer or multiple computers for Your personal, noncommercial use; and b) make appropriate back-up copies of the Software, for use in accordance with Section 1a) above. The Software may contain the software or other property of third party suppliers, some of which may be identified in, and licensed in accordance with, any enclosed 'license.txt' file or other text or file.
Except as expressly stated in this Agreement, no license or right is granted to You directly or by implication, inducement, estoppel or otherwise. Intel will have the right to inspect or have an independent auditor inspect Your relevant records to verify Your compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. 2 RESTRICTIONS.
Best thing to do in my experience is to clean up about once a month to once every other month. Takes about an hour but I delete everything I dont need, clean the cache, history, empty garbage can etc, etc. Then use carbon copy cloner on an external HD.
Partition your SSD. Restore it back to all 0's. Boot from the external HD that you cloned and reclone from the external HD to your internal SSD. BAM back to blazing fast.
I a heavy downloader and that leads to lots of deleting. In an average month to 2 month time my boot time will almost double from so much stuff being deleted. So for an hour of your time once every other month I have found this method to be the best way thus far.
Hope that helps.02. Click to expand.Well I just started noticing this when I was trying to show my coworker how much better a macbook is compared to a dell notebook, so I rebooted and was surprised that it took so long.
Then today, I finally decided to measure it and recorded several attempts to be 52-55 seconds (from the moment i pushed the power button to when my dock and stuff is loaded). Imma try that clonezilla idea tomorrow. But another question, isn't a ssd limited to a certain number of writes and if I do that like once a month, wouldn't I be shortening the life of the drive alot quicker?
Btw thanks for the replies. Well I just started noticing this when I was trying to show my coworker how much better a macbook is compared to a dell notebook, so I rebooted and was surprised that it took so long. Then today, I finally decided to measure it and recorded several attempts to be 52-55 seconds (from the moment i pushed the power button to when my dock and stuff is loaded). Imma try that clonezilla idea tomorrow.
But another question, isn't a ssd limited to a certain number of writes and if I do that like once a month, wouldn't I be shortening the life of the drive alot quicker? Btw thanks for the replies. Best thing to do in my experience is to clean up about once a month to once every other month. Takes about an hour but I delete everything I dont need, clean the cache, history, empty garbage can etc, etc. Then use carbon copy cloner on an external HD. Partition your SSD. Restore it back to all 0's.
Boot from the external HD that you cloned and reclone from the external HD to your internal SSD. BAM back to blazing fast.
Possible Intel Ssd 25x-m Trim Solution For Machine
I a heavy downloader and that leads to lots of deleting. In an average month to 2 month time my boot time will almost double from so much stuff being deleted. So for an hour of your time once every other month I have found this method to be the best way thus far. Hope that helps.02. Click to expand.That's why I used HDDerase.
It can restore intel drives to a pristine state in terms of performance. But it wipes everything and requires that you use version 3.3 since 4.0 doesn't support intel drives. Here's the quote from intel, addressing the issue on G1 drives without Trim, which unfortunately is where OS X is at. (boot into a windows partition on another drive, and use the intel tool to wipe the disk also) SSD devices are not aware of the files written within, but are rather only aware of the Logical Block Addresses (LBAs) which contain valid data.
Once data is written to a Logical Block Address (LBA), the SSD must now treat that data as valid user content and never throw it away, even after the host “deletes” the associated file. Today, there is no ATA protocol available to tell the SSDs that the LBAs from deleted files are no longer valid data.
This fact, coupled with highly random write testing, leaves the drive in an extremely fragmented state which is optimized to provide the best performance possible for that random workload. Unfortunately, this state will not immediately result in characteristic user performance in client benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage, etc. Without significant usage (writing) in typical client applications allowing the drive to adapt (defragment) back to a typical client usage condition. In order to reset the state of the drive to a known state that will quickly adapt to new workloads for best performance, the SSD’s unused content needs to be defragmented. There are two methods which can accomplish this task.
One method is to use IOMeter to sequentially write content to the entire drive. This can be done by configuring IOMeter to perform a 1 second long sequential read test on the SSD drive with a blank NTFS partition installed on it. In this case, IOMeter will “Prepare” the drive for the read test by first filling all of the available space sequentially with an IOBW.tst file, before running the 1 second long read test. This is the most “user-like” method to accomplish the defragmentation process, as it fills all SSD LBAs with “valid user data” and causes the drive to quickly adapt for a typical client user workload. An alternative method (faster) is to use a tool to perform a SECURE ERASE command on the drive.
Possible Intel Ssd 25x-m Trim Solution For Macbook Pro
This command will release all of the user LBA locations internally in the drive and result in all of the NAND locations being reset to an erased state. This is equivalent to resetting the drive to the factory shipped condition, and will provide the optimum performance. Intel provided the tool to SSD reviewers, in this case HDDerase 3.3 which is able to perform the secure erase command. It takes 2ms per block of 512KB, and on the 80gb drive took like 20 seconds.
I don't think that HDDerase runs straight on a mac because EFI doesn't support the necessary bios level commands, so I pop the drive into my dell mini and do the erase there. Here's another macbook pro owner's experience. That's why I used HDDerase. It can restore intel drives to a pristine state in terms of performance. But it wipes everything and requires that you use version 3.3 since 4.0 doesn't support intel drives. Here's the quote from intel, addressing the issue on G1 drives without Trim, which unfortunately is where OS X is at.
(boot into a windows partition on another drive, and use the intel tool to wipe the disk also) SSD devices are not aware of the files written within, but are rather only aware of the Logical Block Addresses (LBAs) which contain valid data. Once data is written to a Logical Block Address (LBA), the SSD must now treat that data as valid user content and never throw it away, even after the host deletes the associated file. Today, there is no ATA protocol available to tell the SSDs that the LBAs from deleted files are no longer valid data. This fact, coupled with highly random write testing, leaves the drive in an extremely fragmented state which is optimized to provide the best performance possible for that random workload. Unfortunately, this state will not immediately result in characteristic user performance in client benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage, etc. Without significant usage (writing) in typical client applications allowing the drive to adapt (defragment) back to a typical client usage condition.
In order to reset the state of the drive to a known state that will quickly adapt to new workloads for best performance, the SSDs unused content needs to be defragmented. There are two methods which can accomplish this task. One method is to use IOMeter to sequentially write content to the entire drive. This can be done by configuring IOMeter to perform a 1 second long sequential read test on the SSD drive with a blank NTFS partition installed on it. In this case, IOMeter will Prepare the drive for the read test by first filling all of the available space sequentially with an IOBW.tst file, before running the 1 second long read test. This is the most user-like method to accomplish the defragmentation process, as it fills all SSD LBAs with valid user data and causes the drive to quickly adapt for a typical client user workload.
An alternative method (faster) is to use a tool to perform a SECURE ERASE command on the drive. This command will release all of the user LBA locations internally in the drive and result in all of the NAND locations being reset to an erased state. This is equivalent to resetting the drive to the factory shipped condition, and will provide the optimum performance. Intel provided the tool to SSD reviewers, in this case HDDerase 3.3 which is able to perform the secure erase command. It takes 2ms per block of 512KB, and on the 80gb drive took like 20 seconds.
I don't think that HDDerase runs straight on a mac because EFI doesn't support the necessary bios level commands, so I pop the drive into my dell mini and do the erase there. Here's another macbook pro owner's experience. Click to expand.Umm yes you can.
If you boot into a dos environment on a machine that uses bios. The low level ATA command set HDDerase uses will wipe anything because it doesn't see partitions or any data, it sees LBA data.
And having done it twice already. I can say it does wipe the mac data, in less than 20 seconds Please take a minute or so to read on on the Secure Erase Command built into the ATA Specification, which, while unused most of the time, is built into every ATA and SATA drive since 2001. It's one of the tools intel recommends themselves for this.
This command can wipe bad sector data which can't be touched normally. Mac partition data means nothing to it. It's supposedly more secure than any external overwriting program according to the NSA.