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I have a 2019 MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina. I have a Samsung 840 EVO 750GB SSD that used to be the internal drive of a different MacBook Pro before its logic board died. I've repurposed this 840 SSD as an external drive using the StarTech USB31CSAT3CB (SATA-to-USB-C-3.1 adapter, which supports TRIM).

For a while, performance was great (100s of MB/sec read and write), but I recently reformatted the drive to erase some data that I don't want to keep around, and now write performance has tanked. I'm still getting 100s of MB/sec read, but write performance varies between 1 and 30 MB/sec. After a morning of searching, my best bet is that it needs a firmware update (it's on EXT0BB0Q but the latest is EXT0DB6Q) and a good TRIM (which this adapter supports), but making those happen has proved...difficult for someone who has only Macs and Linux machines and no Windows machines.

The easiest tool (and officially-supported tool) appears to be Samsung Magician, but it's Windows-only. Shouldn't be a problem, after all, I have Parallels Desktop, right? Well ... I mounted the drive in Windows 10, downloaded and installed Samsung Magician, and opened it. It recognized the drive and displayed all of its details, but I can't do anything. Every single feature (performance optimization, secure erase, etc.) says:

"The selected drive does not support this feature."

And, there's no "Update" button underneath "Firmware," even though it clearly shows that it's using an old firmware version. The most logical conclusion is that Samsung Magician can't do these things because of the way Parallels Desktop is exposing the drive to it.

So, is this even possible? If not, what other approaches can I take to return my external SSD back to the write speeds it was displaying just last week? Or do I just have a brick SSD now that I might as well trash?

Giacomo1968
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Nick Williams
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1 Answers1

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From personal experience, the only way to update any Samsung SSD is format as NTFS, put it in a Windows PC & do it from there. Transfer back to the Mac & reformat again.

Their Mac version of the firmware updater simply does not work. [Typical Samsung, unfortunately] You can't do it from Parallels or Boot Camp.

You could try Disk Sensei [I haven't used the newest 'Sensei' version] to see if a manual trim will improve things for you. I've had noticeable results on earlier versions.

Tetsujin
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