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I'm on a macbook pro (10.8) with an SSD. Large downloads are ending up corrupt. I suspect that this is because the SSD is failing. Spotlight indexing is taking a very long time as well.

I plan to replace the drive soon, but in the meantime is there anything I can do to try and get the downloads to complete successfully?

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  • If the drive is about to fail you should stop using it all together.
    – Ramhound
    Mar 15, 2013 at 17:29
  • Are you sure it's the SSD? Try another browser, and/or another internet connection.
    – TFM
    Mar 17, 2013 at 6:33
  • You really didn't describe the problem. "Large" meaning how large? "Downloads" meaning files downloaded using a browser or something else? "Corrupt" in what way? You say you suspect the SSD is failing but you don't say why. Apr 12, 2013 at 5:53

3 Answers 3

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SSD files can take much more abuse than a regular spinning drive, so it may be possible that it's not going to fail, have you tried with another browser? Safari sometimes does funny things to downloads.

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    "Safari sometimes does funny things to downloads"... Interesting assumption. Care to explain what these funny things are? Are the downloads getting clown suits before they are saved to disk?
    – TFM
    Mar 17, 2013 at 6:35
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I know that this is an controversial software on this forum but here is my suggestion. Try spinrite. And run the software on level 1 which does not do a severe write on the drive which is terrible for SSD's. On level 1 it will defiantly help the drive find it's own problems and possibly fix it.

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You can test the SSD using Scannerz in cursory mode. Scannerz can detect bad blocks in SSDs and identify them as bad sectors. Scannerz uses a "normal mode" that's not worth using on SSDs because it's checking for degradation of mechanical components which SSDs don't have. I don't have the company's site handy and I don't remember it, so just do a Google for "Scannerz" and you'll find it. The company now has a "How-to" section that has some articles on stuff like drives going bad, performance problems, etc. which might help you identify the spinning beach balls.

With that said, however, the SSD is supposed to be "auto correcting" these sorts of things. In other words, if it writes to a memory block in an SSD and the block is bad, it's supposed to automatically mark the block bad and not use it - or so the SSD manufacturers claim. However, I came across a post on another site where Scannerz picked up bad sectors on an SSD and the SSD didn't remap them or apparently even detect them. The owner complained to the manufacturer so they're replacing it under warranty.

As another poster said, it might be your internet connection corrupting the downloads, not the SSD. When I've done fairly large OS updates for OS X, once in a while I'll get an error when the update is opened up and checked indicating that the download was essentially corrupt. I need to re-try it and it usually (usually!!) gets downloaded all right.

Also, you seem to imply the SSD is old, and with performance problems I have to wonder if you have TRIM support enabled (or if it will even work with your SSD).

SSDs right now are a moving target that hasn't stabilized.

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