MacBook – Orphaned inodes in SSD in MacBook Pro Early 2011

disk-utilityhard drivemacbook prossd

I have a Macbook Pro 15″ Early 2011.
Last year I changed the disk to put a new Samsung SSD (Evo).
Recently my computer was really slow. I rebooted on the recovery partition, and tested my disk with Disk Utility. It showed a lot of "orphaned inodes".

After a clean install and a few weeks, I had the same problem. So I started thinking the SSD was failing. After another few weeks, I couldn't even boot (prohibitory sign at bootup).

I sent it to Samsung as it was still under warranty. They apparently tested it, and saw no problem at all. They formatted it again and flashed it with the last firmware.

I received it two days ago, did a clean install, and today if I run Disk Utility, I still have these orphaned inodes.

What can I do? Is the SSD failing, or can it be some other part of my computer?

Best Answer

Orphaned inodes, are common, but they do normally get cleaned, latest after a restart.

This is not a bug, it's the journaling clearing up a normal situation. An "orphaned" inode in this context is one which has been explicitly deleted, but which was still open by some process when it was deleted. The file vanishes completely from the directory structure, but normal Unix semantics require it to remain present on disk until the last user of that file closes it. At that point, the inode itself (as opposed to the directory entries pointing to it) is deleted, and the disk space used by the file is cleaned up.

In you case you use a application that does not release them (even if marked as deleted).

You could close apps to check, or use a terminal 

sudo iosnoop

Type Password and wait and observe.

Look for who is still writing to the SSD.

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