In late 2014 Amazon had a great deal on the Samsung 840 EVO SSD, and I took the opportunity to upgrade my aging MacBook Pro with it. Replacing the original hard drive was quick and easy, and the improvement in performance was obvious and profound. Anything involving disk access now seemed instantaneous.

Soon after, I read on Anandtech that that would dramatically slow down read performance for data that had not been rewritten in a while. The bug fix came out in October 2014, first as a Windows application, and with a Mac/Linux version promised by the end of October. As a Mac user I naturally waited until the Mac version came out and fortunately it became available for download a few days before the end of October. Unfortunately, the next challenge was to figure out how to install it. Update: (April 28, 2015) that Samsung has released another firmware update EXT0DB6Q, with a downloadable ISO image for Mac users, to try and finally resolve the 840 EVO performance problem after it turned out that the first update. This new version EXT0DB6Q is more recent than the version installed by the software in this article. I successfully applied firmware update EXT0DB6Q to my 840 EVO using the same CD technique I describe later in this article (“”). Mac users should note that the linked PC Perspective article says the ISO image can be installed on computers without optical drives using “a tool such as Rufus.” Getting the software You can download the Samsung software from the web page. Update: As of April 23, 2015, the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software section has been removed from the Samsung software page.

It has apparently been replaced by the new firmware noted in the other Update above. But the Mac updater came in a form I didn’t expect. While the Windows version is a point-and-click Windows application that lets you use the computer while it works in the background, the “Mac/Linux version” is actually a command line utility and has to be installed on a CD or USB drive that you can boot the Mac from. But the Mac version does not run under OS X, so you can’t use any solution that involves a drive that boots into OS X. That means you have to come up with a bootable non-OS X USB flash drive or CD, something that can be challenging for a computer user who has limited or no experience with a command line. (Almost) creating a bootable USB flash drive with the fix I first thought I could just download the “Bootable USB disk” version of the software (Samsung_Performance_Restoration_USB_Bootable.zip) and image it onto a USB flash drive. But the Samsung “Bootable USB disk” version isn’t actually bootable on a Mac from a USB flash drive.

Inserting a page break in word for mac. How to get windows on mac. It contains only the Samsung utility, no bootable operating system of any kind. After looking up various instructions on the Web I was able to use Terminal to copy the image to a USB flash drive I formatted as MS-DOS FAT, but the drive was not visible in the list of volumes you get when you hold down Option while starting up a Mac, even after I found FreeDOS and added that to the disk image. A little more research revealed that you can’t boot a Mac from a USB flash drive unless it has the right EFI boot loader on it, and that isn’t included with either the Samsung updater or FreeDOS. You have to find the bootable USB flash drive software and figure out how to put it together on your own.

Samsung actually warns you about this in the accompanying: If you use a USB device 1) Please set your USB drive into a “bootable” state before starting the Performance Restoration software. 2) For assistance on completing this step, please refer to USB boot utilities from a trusted internet site. Thanks a lot, Samsung. Basically this means if you don’t have the technical expertise to set up your own bootable USB flash drive, which usually requires Terminal commands, you’re out of luck with the USB flash drive option.

(A couple months ago I successfully used the Terminal to copy another company’s DOS software onto a USB flash drive that did boot my Mac, but that’s because that company first made sure their disk image had everything necessary to boot a Mac. Samsung didn’t.) While I’ve been using computers long enough to be the guy that my friends turn to for troubleshooting OS X and Windows and installing hardware upgrades, my Terminal skills are limited. I had already spent some time trying to figure out the bootable flash drive question and I probably could eventually, but after trying a few things that didn’t work I decided my time is better spent on other things.