11/7/2019 Samsung 860 Evo For Mac
Hello, I am having a problem with my newly installed Samsung 860 Evo SSD. I'm running Yosemite and Windows 7 with bootcamp. When running Yosemite, I'll get the beach ball after a few minutes or so and the OS becomes unresponsive which forces me to do a hard shutdown.
I've already replaced the SATA cable twice in a matter of two weeks. I bought one a $10 one from amazon and then the recommended one from ifixit, I've put electrical tape down under the cable and on both cables, both are causing the same problems. I turned TRIM on and still the problem persists. My bottom RAM slot is definitely finicky, but I loosened the screws on the RAM bay and have been fine for the last couple days so I don't believe it's a RAM issue. Not too sure what to do at this point.
Our Samsung 860 EVO sample for today is the 2TB model in the M.2 SATA form factor. This is the largest M.2 capacity available, though the 2.5' models go up to 4TB. Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM) - Compare Prices in Real-time, Set a Price Alert, and see the Price History Graph to find the cheapest price with GoSale - America's Largest Price Comparison Website! Windows 8/Windows 7/Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit), Vista (SP1 and above), XP (SP2 and above), MAC.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Sidenote: Oddly enough, my windows 7 partition works flawlessly. Update I actually sent my 860 EVO in to samsung for 'repairs' to see if that would do anything. They just updated the firmware supposedly which did nothing.
Nothing left to do but try the crucial MX500. Since you've already tried cable replacement, first thing to try, we are left with three possible issues: faulty drive, faulty logic board, Yosemite and the drive don't like each other. If you have your old hard drive you could try reinstall it to rule out a possible logic board failure. If that succeeds I would evaluate the possibility to update your OS to High Sierra and see if that solves your problem. If that fails too, you might have had a bad luck and got a faulty Samsung, since it's new you shouldn't have a problem to get it replaced.
I've put ton's of Samsung SSD into both 13' & 15' MacBook Pro's. The biggest problem I see is damaged/worn HD cables or the original cable which can't support the higher I/O flows the SSD pushes. As a matter of course I always replace the cable and I place a strip of electricians tape on the uppercase where the cable crosses over as the rough aluminum surface. The other issue I often see is the cable has been creased into a sharp corner this damages the fragile foil wires. You want smooth arcs. The last issue is making sure to prep the drive properly, setup a USB thumb drive as a bootable OS installer following this guide then use migration assistant to move your stuff over. I strongly recommend sticking with Sierra as High Sierra and Mojave upgrade the file system from HFS+ to APFS.
So far APFS has performance issues running on SATA based SSD's. I had the same exact issue with early 2011 Macbook Pro and 860 EVO - freezing hard a few minutes after startup, including Safe Mode. After numerous efforts to troubleshoot the OS installation I just swapped 860 EVO for a Crucial MX500 - the problem was gone, working perfectly.
Just to check I cloned MX500 to the EVO again and put it back in the Macbook, freezing returned. So I am going with MX500. Interestingly, I thoroughly tested the EVO in an external USB3 enclosure and no errors were found. My conclusion is that there is some sort of inherent compatibility issue between Macbook and EVO that users will occasionally experience - possibly on a specific batch of EVO products.
Update Earlier I wrote about the problem I encountered with a 1TB 860 EVO in my 2011 MacBook Pro 15” that went away only after I swapped it for an Mx500. Well, later I installed another, 500GB 860 EVO in a 13” 2011 MacBook Pro. Though with half the capacity of the first one, this one has been working flawlessly for a few months now.
In nether the first nor the second 860 EVO had I upgraded any firmware. Again, it's also in a different, 13 “ with Yosemite and not a 15” MacBook Pro with High Sierra. Try swapping out the ribbon cable that runs between the hard drive and the logic board. You can buy them here at ifixit, Powerbookmedic or Beetstech (if either of the latter two, tell 'em Chris sent you). A few of the MBP models around that era have notorious issues with that cable, which will run you around $20 delivered.
One client has been back several times to have the same cable replaced, I'm guessing because he keeps crushing the notebook in his backpack. The fastest way to determine if it's the drive or the cable, is to begin by removing the bottom panel, unplugging the battery from the board and unscrewing the drive bracket.
Remove the bracket and the drive, carefully disconnecting the sata ribbon cable from the drive. Using a $10 sata to usb adapter from your local computer parts store (I'm not pro-Amazon), connect the drive and lay it down circuit-side up. Plug in the battery. Carefully align the bottom panel with the case so as not to touch any metal on the board.
Replace the screws after this test. Plug in the adapter to an available usb port (any other ports should be unoccupied).
Plug in the magsafe and hit the power button. Give it a moment to find the (now) external drive and startup. If you're able to carry on about your session as usual, indications are that the hd ribbon cable is your culprit. Assessment made, please promptly and properly shut down the Mac (Apple menu Shut Down). Wait until it's completely powered off before disconnecting the drive. Reassembly it with the new cable. Continue Mac-ing.
My theory: either weight of the Mac causes the bottom panel to push up touching the cable, squeezing it between part of the frame or optical drive. Over time, the pressure wears out the cable. The symptoms are similar to a failing drive and can lead to many hours wasted of failed OS install attempts and troubleshooting.
I speak from experience. Chris Leeds, IACS Well Connected Life PS Always remember to unplug the battery while inside. I have the same issue with my mac book pro mid 2012 and the newly installed samsung ssd 860 pro. Sometimes it works fine and the speed is great! However, sometimes it does not even boot, the system is showing crossed circle instead of the apple. Upon three failure attempts to boot from ssd, mac starts my previous system which is now installed in the optibay.
And the most interesting thing is that ssd is always available from the old system. I launch the first aid to recover it, check that ssd is the system disk to be boot, and reboot my mac. Again sometimes it helps immediately, sometimes mac just does not want to start and that's it:( Then suddenly in a couple of days it starts from the ssd.
I cannot even understand the logic of such behavior. What could it be? Another issue is that it does not wake up from the sleep mode. Hard reset is the only option. Since new comments are added to this topic, I guess it is my duty to share the solution.
So falks, I have simply bought another ssd by Transcend and replaced the Samsung. It just works and that's it.
The same cable is used, basicaly everything is the same. Not a single failure for more than 3 months. Only positive emotions from my mac and amazing speed! Thus, it seams to me that the issue was some minor but very unpleasant compatibility problem specific to Samsung 860 pro. By the way I have installed it into my pretty old PC, where it works perfect now.
Samsung released its 850 Evo line of SATA SSDs what seems like an eternity ago,. Part of the reason it feels like such a long time is because the drives were so damn good.
There were a few firmware updates, which in general slightly improved overall performance, but unlike the previous 840 Evo there were no serious flaws that required immediate fixing. The result is that the 850 Evo has reigned as our overall Best gaming SSD pretty much since it arrived. Something else to point out is how prices improved over time, even with the upward trend in SSD costs starting in mid-2016. The 250GB model launched at $150, and currently sells for around $100, and it's not even the best value. The 500GB model was always the sweet spot, with a launch price of $270. Yes, it was only three years ago that 480-512GB class SSDs routinely sold for well over $200. The 500GB drive bottomed out at $145, and currently has an online price of $165.
Given the overall performance and reliability, however, we along with many others have continued to recommend the 850 Evo as the best overall SATA SSD. That means the new 860 Evo has some big shoes to fill. While Samsung initially went after a more budget-friendly price with its 750 Evo line, ultimately it didn't fare so well, and these days the 850 Evo is both faster and more affordable. (The 750 Evo appears to be discontinued, based on prices at several places.) The 860 Evo ends up as the logical successor to the 850 Evo, with similar price targets but improved reliability and higher capacities. The table below shows the key specifications, for Samsung's new 860 Pro and Evo as well as the previous 850 Pro and Evo and 750 Evo.
I haven't received any 860 Pro models for testing, though Samsung did provide a 500GB and 4TB model of the 860 Evo. Yeah, that's a big drive, and the added capacity does improve throughput in some cases (I suspect the 1TB and larger models all perform similarly). Pricing also scales substantially if you want such a large SSD, with the 4TB drive carrying a suggested price of $1400. Maybe sometime in the 20s, we'll all be running 4TB SSDs that only cost a few hundred dollars, but it's in the realm of extreme storage for now.
The 860 Evo also features Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite, which uses a portion of the NAND as an SLC buffer. The size of that buffer increases with the capacity of the drive, and Samsung lists both before and after TurboWrite speeds.
While both the 250GB and 500GB models drop to 300MB/s after the TurboWrite buffer is filled, the 1TB model can still sustain 500MB/s while the 2TB and 4TB drives can sustain the full 550MB/s speed (for sequential data). The 860 Evo is also available in M.2 SATA and mSATA formats, if you don't want a 2.5-inch drive. The performance won't be any better (or worse), and the maximum capacity is lower—2TB for M.2 2280 and 1TB for mSATA—so if you have an older laptop that uses one of those formats, the 860 Evo provides an option for a modern upgrade. The 860 Pro looks the same but with a red square in place of the gray square. The key difference between the Pro and Evo lines is that the Pro series use MLC V-NAND instead of TLC V-NAND, with higher endurance ratings and better sustained write performance. TLC does reduce performance when performing large sustained write workloads, but for most home PCs it shouldn't present a problem.
It's interesting that the 860 Pro drops the longer 10-year warranty of the 850 Pro, though it's probably not a huge loss as ten years is a virtual eternity in computer hardware. The bigger deal is the change in endurance ratings. Samsung was very conservative with the 850 series, especially on the larger models. The 4TB 850 Evo for example has the same 300TB endurance rating as the 2TB drive, and the 500GB and 1TB models both have half that at 150TB.
For the 860 Evo, the base endurance jumps to 150TB for the 250GB model, and it scales proportionately up through 2400TB for the 4TB drive. The 860 Pro meanwhile doubles the endurance at every capacity, with up to 4.8PB for the 4TB drive. That's impressive, though it's worth noting that still wins easily, with a rating of 10 DWPD (drive writes per day) for five years. That yields an endurance of 5.11PB for the 280GB model, and 8.76PB for the 480GB drive. But Optane 900P is obviously in a different price and performance class, so the comparison isn't entirely fair. Given the target pricing, however, where the 850 Pro made sense at launch for more demanding workloads, these days I recommend moving to an NVMe drive and leaving SATA behind if you're looking for better performance, since even modest NVMe drives often easily beat even the fastest SATA drives. That puts the 860 Pro in a rather niche market.
(Stock) (OS drive) For the performance testing, I've highlighted both 860 Evo models in the charts. In many instances, the two are very close in performance, though there are cases where one drive performs a bit faster.
I normally try to stick with SSDs in the 480-525GB range for testing where possible, though in same cases I've only been able to test a larger drive. Note that there are no NVMe drives in the charts. The slowest NVMe SSD I've tested still rates higher in most tests than the fastest SATA drive, thanks to its high sequential read speeds, though the price is also higher. Our Best NVMe SSDs guide shows the overall performance of NVMe drives, and I'll have a new NVMe drive review up later today if you want to see the individual charts.
My SSD benchmark suite consists of a mix of theoretical and real-world metrics. Other tests are also run both to condition the drive and to ensure there are no oddities, but for the charts I focus on CrystalDiskMark, IOMeter (mixed read/write performance), file copying, and PCMark 8 Storage. I take the results (in MB/s) from ten of the tests and give each equal weighting (ie, geometric mean) to come up with the aggregate score. While it's impossible for a single number to tell you everything you need to know about an SSD, still it provides a good high-level view of what to expect. Image 14 of 14 The 860 Evo drives are good contenders, with only the 850 Pro and the large 2TB 850 Evo beating the 500GB model in the aggregate score. In the individual test results, however, things aren't quite so cut and dry. Sequential read/write performance looks decent, but heavy sustained random IO falls behind the 850 Evo, sometimes by a wide margin.
It's worth noting that the QD1 results are quite good, however, which is where most user workloads end up running. Elsewhere, PCMark 8 favors sequential performance over write speeds, giving the 860 Evo top honors for bandwidth. The real-world file copy test on the other hand has mediocre results. I copy the contents of Batman: Arkham Origins onto the same drive via a PowerShell script—there are about 8,800 files totaling just under 20GiB. This is about as strenuous of a 'real-world' workload as most home users and gamers are likely to run, and like IOMeter it shows that there are clearly faster drives. Should you buy an 860 Evo? Overall, the 860 Evo is a good addition to the world of SATA SSDs, though it does feel somewhat unnecessary as performance hasn't changed much from the 850 Evo.
It seems more than anything that the new brand is a result of the switch to Samsung's 64-layer V-NAND, a move which I wholly support. Many other manufacturers change NAND without any clear indication that performance also changed, but that's not a problem here. The official launch prices for the 860 Evo feel a bit high, but will hopefully come down as availability improves. Putting more layers in the NAND should reduce costs over time, and it helps bring higher capacities to market.
This doesn't inherently make the drive better, but the combination of a refined controller and other firmware tweaks is good. More than anything else, the 860 Evo is about taking what was good with the 850 Evo and making it more reliable. The new endurance ratings are great to see, as the previous 300TB rating of the larger 850 Evo models was woefully inadequate (and completely inaccurate based on what I've seen elsewhere).
Now, each 850 Evo is effectively rated at 600 full drive writes. That might not seem like that much on the surface, but over five years that would entail writing about 164GB per day, every day, to the 500GB model—or a somewhat ludicrous 1,315GB per day to the 4TB drive. You'd fill up the drive after just three days if you're actually writing that much data, but basically it's Samsung's way of saying your data is safe. (But you should still have a backup of important files!) If you're in the market for a new SATA SSD, the 860 Evo takes its place alongside the 850 Evo as a high quality and good performance drive. With the new models now available, the 850 Evo will likely get phased out, and in time the 860 Evo will become the best SATA option from Samsung. Other manufacturers also compete in the SATA space, however, and we'll be looking at one of the more promising contenders soon (Crucial's MX500). Perhaps the best way to put things is that the 860 Evo in most respects is equal or better than its predecessor—a feat that most other manufacturers have been unable to achieve even after three years of trying.
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