Apple HDD go slow

[chrisbainbridge]

Stupid apple update.  My wife has a 2017 iMac. not the fastest but reasonable with a 1TB drive.  I upgraded her to Mojave a little while ago.  She suddenly told me that it was running very slowly.

Now you have to realise that my wife is one of those people who can destroy computers and networks just b y sitting next to them.  She does not even have to use a computer for it to freeze, seriously!

So I checked for malware, viruses, etc. Nothing.

Checked CPU utilisation  10%, RAM similar.

Then I realised programs were fine once they started, 40 bounces plus to open Word but then it worked fine.  Another 40 bounces to print or longer.

Ah, the HDD. only 300Gb of 1Tb used so not overfull.

in desperation I installed a SSD and cloned the HDD.  Back to normal speed.


Now I could understand this on an old machine but this is barely 2 years old!  I love Apple toys but this is a bit much.

[Jurek]

I have two iMacs.
One (2012) running the 'old' Power PC operating system.
The other (2015) running the new / current OS. Which takes 'forever' to start up.
Once it is running it is ok.
However, during startup, I may as well go and cook myself a breakfast.

Word has it, that the current OS is ideally configured to a SSD rather than a spinny disc, which is what my 2015 iMac has.

[StuAff]

Recent OS releases, not just Mojave, are definitely far better on SSD...

[chrisbainbridge]

Recent OS releases, not just Mojave, are definitely far better on SSD...

It would be nice if they told us. Then I would not have updated and would not have wasted several hours of work.

[SteveC]

Mine is a late 2015 model and does have the fusion drive (combined HDD/SSD).
I thought they'd come in a little bit before that, though.

[StuAff]

Optimisation for spinning rust seems, er, suboptimal. Even given that SSDs are so much faster, even on slower interfaces, and now (relatively) affordable, HD performance as MacOS boot drives seems to have fallen off a cliff. My Mac Pro (3.33 six core, High Sierra) feels very slow to boot off HD indeed.

[Phil W]

Not just Apple either. I have a hybrid SSD / HD drive. Think the SSD bit is 8Gb and is meant to act as a kind of cache for the files required at boot. Worked great initially with 5 second boot times for W10.  But I think the regular OS updates keep invalidating the "cache" and so it never gets a full grip on files required for boot.

[andrewc]

My 2008 iMac is still nicely responsive since I performed open heart surgery & replaced the spinny drive with an SSID. I won’t run the latest OS though.

[grams]

Now I could understand this on an old machine but this is barely 2 years old!  I love Apple toys but this is a bit much.

A certain percentage of spinny disks go bad over time, no matter how much you're prepared to pay for them. Not much Apple can do of that short of bringing spinny disk manufacturing in house.

[Jaded]

Unfortunately they re-wrote the OS a few iterations back and effectively did away with HDs as opposed to SSDs. HDs and modern OSX versions do no get on at all. I think there are thousands disk accesses that in the past were optimised out - no need to with SSDs.