Hi all,

My little sister bought a MacBook 13" Unibody (aluminium) which comes with a measly 160 Gb Toshiba HDD.
We bought a new Western Digital 640 Gb drive and I used Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the drive and then I installed the new hard drive for her.

And it's quite a lot slower to boot.
I was expecting to sacrifice a little speed for a large hard drive but it's really quite significantly slower. Not up there with Vista slow horribleness, naturally but significantly slower. From cold boot, it also takes quite a lot longer before it even shows the Apple logo (nothing but grey screen for an appreciable length of time, perhaps 12 seconds), then the Apple logo and wheel for longer than before, while it boots.

Drive speeds once booted into 10.6.2 seem very similar if not the same as before.
Could this be a consequence of CCCing the drive? Would a fresh install to an empty drive bring it back to prior boot speeds?
Would rather not try it if it won't make a difference since it's not a short procedure, what with all the applications and so on.

Many thanks,
Diz.

Get an enclosure for the old drive - you can pick something reasonable up for less than a tenner.
Install Snow Leopard on the new drive, then use the Migration Assistant to bring across the apps etc. from the old drive in the enclosure.
I'm almost certain you'll see an increase in speed.

Is the drive still indexing? If so this will slow it down considerably.
I'd also try a fresh install if the indexing is finished but it's still slow.

Mark

That would be post boot though...

It sounds like the new drive is taking a lot longer to get power and to spin up to speed.

Diziet, what happens when you sleep the MacBook? Does it take longer for the drive to spin back up as well?

True.
I'm assuming the drive bought was a 7200rpm and not a 5200rpm because y'know, that would cause a slow down in boot time.

Mark

The old one was a Toshiba 160GB MK1655GSX which is 5,400 RPM.
The new one is also 5,400 RPM.

After several boots, boot time has decreased a lot once the apple logo appears (ie time until desktop and dock appear), but cold boot/grey screen to Apple logo is still 10 or 12 seconds, which it wasn't with the original drive. Almost like the EFI is objecting since it's not a made-for-apple drive like the toshiba (which has an Apple logo on; I presume they produce them in batches for Apple)

Spin up time from sleep is almost impossible to tell since it's as near as damn-it instant-on, and the hard drive dampeners are so efficient it's hard to hear the thing spin up.

Better than it was, but still not as good as the original drive.
I wonder if there's anything I can do to reduce the delay at startup.
Even resinstalling SL might not help since turn on to apple logo time is unlikely to be dependent on files on the drive, it's simply that the EFI takes longer to agree all is ok to boot.

Of course I could be wrong, it's been known.....

Just a thought but you didn't add any extra RAM at the same time you installed the drive did you?
Upping the RAM will mean the system takes a little longer to boot but it shouldn't be a massive increase.

I don't suppose you see anything suspicious in the system logs do you?

If it's a Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB hard drive then I've read bad things about it's performance.

Mark

I didn't add any RAM, and there's nothing untoward in the logs.

It is the drive you mention, the WD Caviar, but its slightly slower performance wouldn't necessarily account for its slow EFI time. Unless I'm wrong.
My little sis was prepared to sacrifice a little speed for size, and I too read a couple of reviews saying it wasn't the fastest drive in existence but it shouldn't delay boot time by 12 seconds before there's even any drive access.

Oh well.
Diz.

SOLVED!

Guess who forgot to define the new hard disk as the startup disk in system prefs?
I'd always assumed this was the equivalent of "Mark partition as active" but it now I guess it talks to the EFI otherwise the efi waits for something else to boot it before defaulting to the internal drive.

Now it's marked as the startup drive it's the same speed as the original drive.

Thanks for your help all,

Diz

I'm only running leopard, not the snowy cat but what do you mean?

On my system, you don't get to select the startup disk.

Sure, there's a startup disk icon in prefs but it doesn't indicate the default startup disk or give an option to change it, only an option to select a drive and reboot with that drive as the startup disk.

Am I missing something?




In this screenshot, it's only gone blue because I clicked on it. Initially, there was no indication on either item.

I think that it remembers your last choice.
After cloning, I never told it to boot from this new disk, and I think Efi was still looking for the old 160 gig one.

After I chose this (and yes, it doesn't say which is your boot drive or give you any other info) it worked perfectly.

I presume it keeps your last choice or writes it to the Efi (BIOS equiv) and until you choose another drive, it keeps on booting from that one.

But it works! Very good news.
Happy New Year all,

Diz.

Oh right cool.

Thanks for the tip!

My MacBook was always slow to boot, and when I bought my Mini it was nice and quick. After putting the MacBook's drive into the Mini, it too was slow to boot.

I've clicked on the drive, so I'll see if it's any quicker next time and post back!