KVR Audio

el-bo (formerly ebow) · Wed Oct 15, 2014 4:04 pm

p.s anyone who gets this working on a mac, please let me know. i have been holding off buying one until this has been sorted

thanks

PhilG · Post by **PhilG** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 5:04 pm

The Fix for Mac and Linux is announced for end of october.

It drove me mad not being able to find the cause, why my Macbook needed longer to boot and the project loading times increasing every week.
Then I found some posts about this Evo bug.

I tried to update the firmware before and failed.
My Superdrive has been replaced by a 512 GB 840 EVO which should store all my Kontakt, Independence, Spectrasonics and other libraries.
All together 450 GB of samples and sounds!
The Superdrive works great as external drive, but I couldn´t get this iso file to boot up with it or any other external drive.
Burned the iso on CD, DVD, mounted it with disk utility and converted it before burning, all without success.
I ended up with installing a bootcamp partition and running Samsung Magician from there.

The main HD, an EVO with 120 GB, has been replaced last week with a Sandisk Extreme Pro 240 GB because of the slowdown and need for more space.

Because I´m tired of waiting another two weeks and having no hope to get a working solution from Samsung for Macs, I saved all data on an external USB 3.0 drive.
Then I booted into Windows and formatted the EVO to NTFS, ran the Restoration Tool, booted into OS X and reformatted to HFS+ and played back all the data.

I hope this is working, if not I will have to save my money and get another Sandisk Extreme Pro soon.
Thx to Anandtech for pointing me to these SSD.

Edit:

Everything is up and running again.
Firmware has been updated, restoration has been completed with the method described above.

I can load all instruments, that´s fine.
But get some crashes when loading older projects.
Loading time of projects didn´t improve much.

Benchmarking went from read speed ~500 MB/s down to ~330 MB/s.

el-bo (formerly ebow) · Wed Oct 15, 2014 5:08 pm

PhilG wrote:The Fix for Mac and Linux is announced for end of october.

It drove me mad not being able to find the cause, why my Macbook needed longer to boot and the project loading times increasing every week.
Then I found some posts about this Evo bug.

I tried to update the firmware before and failed.
My Superdrive has been replaced by a 512 GB 840 EVO which should store all my Kontakt, Independence, Spectrasonics and other libraries.
All together 450 GB of samples and sounds!
The Superdrive works great as external drive, but I couldn´t get this iso file to boot up with it or any other external drive.
Burned the iso on CD, DVD, mounted it with disk utility and converted it before burning, all without success.
I ended up with installing a bootcamp partition and running Samsung Magician from there.

The main HD, an EVO with 120 GB, has been replaced last week with a Sandisk Extreme Pro 240 GB because of the slowdown and need for more space.

Because I´m tired of waiting another two weeks and having no hope to get a working solution from Samsung for Macs, I saved all data on an external USB 3.0 drive.
Then I booted into Windows and formatted the EVO to NTFS, ran the Restoration Tool, booted into OS X and reformatted to HFS+ and played back all the data.

I hope this is working, if not I will have to save my money and get another Sandisk Extreme Pro soon.
Thx to Anandtech for pointing me to these SSD.

These can compete easily with Samsungs 840 Pro in real life situations and the 850 Pro seems to have problems too.
Some people have noise problems with these drives, emitting a high noise like cheap chargers???

thanks for the update. i hadn't realised that the mac updates listed above were not for this current issue. i see now that it says for the end of the month

sounds like you have had real problems.

msorrels · Post by **msorrels** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 5:09 pm

I ran the new firmware updating for the 1TB 840 EVO this morning. My 840EVO isn't my boot drive though, it's just a work/cache drive (mainly because at the last minute I decided not to risk losing all my software licenses by upgrading to it).

I was a bit worried since it's hooked up through a Highpoint RocketRaid card (but not raided) and Magician never has liked it (it doesn't like anything hooked up through PCIe cards according to it's help file). But the Performance Restoration Software worked fine under Windows 7 64bit. Took a long time to process though (about 1hr40) for a nearly empty drive (only 80gigs in use). The final step it pretty much kept my loud C drive spinning the whole time, which seemed really annoying and likely made it much slower. The firmware update step went by so fast I thought it must have failed. It worked without errors everything is still there.

After it was over I re-ran HD Tune Pro 5.5 and now the benchmark line is pretty much straight across at around 413MB/sec vs before where it was mostly straight except for some areas where it would drop below 300. That's all gone now.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 8:10 pm

a lot of good info. It's funny, when I was shopping for SSD, evo was the choice nearly everyone talked about. Mine is fast still, and I even bought a second one for audio/downloads to replace my very noisy seagate.

Just because I'm chatty, I have my "old" i7 with two WD 500's up and running in case of emergency and used it yesterday. MAN, HD computers are SO slow!

Ok, well thanks for the info. I'll read the instructions and see if I want to do it. I'd hate to corrupt something.

Jennerstein · Post by **Jennerstein** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 10:02 pm

Ok, just finished performing the update. On my Samsung 1TB drive that was half full, it took a little more than 3 hours or so to actually finish.

My actual average read speed went from 41 MB/S to 512 MB/S. So greater than a 10x speed increase. Everything seems fine, will report if any thing comes up when doing recording etc.

highkoo · Post by **highkoo** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 10:29 pm

THANKS FOR THIS THREAD!!

One of these is in the mail on the way to me right now.
I never would have known...

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 4:12 pm

So what firmware is everyone on and went to? Magician is not reporting an update, and I'm currently on EXT0BB0Q.

Devon

PhilG · Post by **PhilG** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 4:56 pm

DevonB,

It´s a stand-alone tool, not via Magician

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... ration.zip

msorrels · Post by **msorrels** » Thu Oct 16, 2014 6:10 pm

PhilG is right, the new firmware isn't available by itself or with Magician. It's version EXT0CB6Q.

legendCNCD · Post by **legendCNCD** » Sat Oct 25, 2014 4:45 pm

Was down to 172MB/s, now after restoring perf, its back at 500MB/s

Jennerstein · Post by **Jennerstein** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 8:22 pm

Looks like Samsung released the Performance Restoration Software for Linux/Mac.

https://www.samsung.com/global/business ... 3-11000279

Scroll down to the middle of the page under the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software section. There is a link for Dos version of the Performance Restoration Software that is for Mac and Linux users.

I do not have a Mac, so I cannot verify whether this software restores performance on a Mac or Linux. But thought some of you would be interested.

el-bo (formerly ebow) · Tue Oct 28, 2014 9:00 pm

Jennerstein wrote:Looks like Samsung released the Performance Restoration Software for Linux/Mac.

https://www.samsung.com/global/business ... 3-11000279

Scroll down to the middle of the page under the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software section. There is a link for Dos version of the Performance Restoration Software that is for Mac and Linux users.

I do not have a Mac, so I cannot verify whether this software restores performance on a Mac or Linux. But thought some of you would be interested.

thanks for the update

. will keep an eye on feedback before taking the plunge

tremolounge · Post by **tremolounge** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:09 pm

I have a Samsung 840 EVO in both my Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro -- running the performance fix on the MBP (NOT my main system!) right now. Weird booting into DOS (flashback to early 90s and Sequencer Plus Gold

).

"Step 2" of the process has been running for about 30 minutes, but the progress dots are incrementing, so... so far, so good...

I booted using the Samsung .iso burned onto a CDR. This post was very helpful:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5132196

"Creating bootable DVDs [or CDs] from .iso by converting to .cdr first" -- I never would've known to do that!

tremolounge · Post by **tremolounge** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:20 pm

... aaaaand... it worked! I didn't do any before/after benchmarks, but the MBP sure as heck booted a lot faster, and Finder operations feel much "snappier"

I'll run it on the Mac Pro later tonight (after a full backup, of course).

Slowdown issues for Samsung 840 EVO SSDs for files older than 3-6 months