Yup. Ditch that rotational drive. Sometimes even drives that pass diags get slow.
Yeah… I work in the storage industry so I get it… but it just happened overnight which was sort of weird.
I love Apple products… I don’t like how their developers code in planned obsolescence though. I’ll give it a shot with an external SSD to see if things get better but I am going to guess that it won’t. There’s no rotational media in iPhones and they usually suffer a similar fate after a few years of updates.
1 Like
I love the twin 27" monitors, and got a dual mount that clamps to the back edge of the desktop. Amazing how much space is saved by losing the two bases.
I did a quick build of High Sierra on an 80G SSD and I am booting off an external SATA tray. It’s WAY faster now. Granted… I also don’t have all my usual garbage on there but it’s still WAY faster on boot and what not.
1 Like
I didn’t catch the model of your iMac, if you wind up putting one inside, most of them require a temp sensor dongleto keep the SMC happy. OWC also makes an adapter to put it in your optical drive bay.
1 Like
I just spent the entire day upgrading my husband’s Mac mini to a Mac Pro (trash can model). Would have been easy if he had been willing to go with the El Capitan it came with, but he wanted to stick with Mavericks because of his photo workflow. So I had to downgrade first, then clear out a ton of unneeded photos (that was the time consuming part) from iPhoto before doing the migration (disk storage was the limiting factor; since it’s an SSD it was smaller than the one in the mini).
The speed improvement is phenomenal!
1 Like
It’s a late 2013 27" Imac. the big flat one without an optical drive. To get to the hard drive is rather involved and requires cutting the foam adhesive that holds the monitor to the chassis. Like I said… I am willing to do it but not when I don’t have a good backup. I have a few macbooks between work and personal use but I still rely on the desktop as a main system.
My work laptop has the 512 SSD in it and it’s blazing fast. It too is a late 2013 model. What’s interesting is the laptop only has 8G of RAM but the SSD and caching make it stupid fast for just about everything.
I may just price out an external SSD for the existing imac and do migration assistant to get it up to par.
OWC’s kit is very close to what OEMs use for service, in some ways their procedure is better than Apples.
A few notes, the cutting tool should be at 90 degrees to the panel, you want that axle on the wheel hard up on the glass. It won’t probably cut all the way though on the first pass, or second, and possibly the third. Do not let the wheel bottom out on the Aluminum lip at the bottom of the panel, it will damage the wheel, and damaged wheels need to be replaced. (Some documentation says they are single use only) Never pry the glass, but by the third pass you should be able to go in and grab any remaining the adhesive with a nylon probe tool, or credit card. There is not a lot of slack in the cables, be VERY careful not to open the display too far.
Once apart, you will peel the adhesive off the panel and the display housing. Be careful on the panel. the black mylar mask is hard to mess up, but I have seen people do it. It will cause a visual defect when reassembled if you try to peel it off, rather than the thin VHB strips.
1 Like
Oh… I know how to do it. =) I am just using every excuse to justify purchasing the new iMac Pro. =) You should have heard me rationalizing the Glowforge 2+ years ago. =)
I did happen to find a 1T Crucial SSD for < $300 last night and it just showed up on the doorstep today (yay!). I am building High Sierra on my laptop and then I will move the device over to my iMac and use Migration Assistant. That way… if it is slowed down after the migration I will know there is likely something in the OS that is unhappy. I expect it to be fine though.
This system will eventually be my wife’s… so at some point that SSD will likely find it’s way inside the chassis. Until then since I keep an external USB3 -> SATAIII adapter on my desk anyway… that’s what I will boot from.
2 Likes
Okay… not that this has anything to do with Inkscape but it sorta rounds out my general issues with the mac.
Installed OSX. Started Migration Assistant. First it said 62 hours to complete then it said 99 then it stuck there for six hours. Did a hard reset and started over. The migration was complete by this morning.
Interestingly enough… the system was still having some slowdown problems and I am reasonably confident that I know why.
Time Machine. I’ve been using Time Machine over to a Drobo for YEARS. Never had a problem. However… if you have marginal spinning media in your system and Time Machine keeps trying to read a bad sector… it will just brute force your machine into a performance black hole.
So it was Time Machine that was making the system abysmally slow all this time. Well… because there is something jacked up on the original hard drive. And since the drive is still connected to the BUS it was still mounting every time even though I am on the SSD. So… sudo bash and edit the fstab to tell it to NEVER mount that dang thing automagically again and… Holy crap it’s like a new machine.
Sadly… I don’t think the Crucial is as fast as a Kingston SSDnow drive I have… but it’s WAY better than the WD 7200 that is in the chassis. The other thing that is annoying is that all diagnostic programs are still showing NOTHING wrong with the WD drive.
Jacked drives are a problem in the Mac. But the root of the problem is the drive, not the Mac. However, they did make the drive hard to replace by most standards. That’s on them.
There is no planned obsolescence. That myth needs to go away.
Glad you figured out the performance woes. Yeah-- marginal drives will kill performance. I have an '11 iMac with a bad drive in it that I’ve done much the same, now booting off a USB SSD (which is tons faster, but still slow on this machine).
BTW: On the Drobo…
(1) It is encryption that causes it to fill rapidly, not Time Machine itself (which will fill it over time). When you configure the Drobo to have a “Time Machine Partition”, you’re really just telling the Drobo to have a fixed, relatively small, partition that OS X can fully encrypt if you allow it to (the default option).
(2) In High Sierra, the file server supports quotas on Time Machine. So, in my case, I hung a Drobo 5C off a Mac mini and have configured users for each of my family members, with a Time Machine quota for each. Now I have multiple users securely backing up to the Drobo on the home LAN with no fear of the Drobo’s filesystem blowing up. It is all built into High Sierra, OS X server not needed.
Okay… perhaps “planned” obsolescence is the wrong phrasing. How about negligent obsolescence?
I would be willing to bet dollars to donuts that when they test upgrades paths… they do it from point A to point B. So… Sierra to High Sierra or Lion to High Sierra… but not Lion to Mountain Lion to Sierra to High Sierra.
The result is that over years of upgrades the systems tend to suffer because older code does NOT work with the newer stuff and it was not deprecated or removed during updates. I have this problem when OSX first game out on the old PPC G4s. If you updated 2-3 versions in a row the box would suffer. If you blanked out the box and started on the newer version that was suffering from upgrade it would now work fine as a fresh install.
When they used to charge for the OS they were better about testing imho. Now that they give the OS away and they make money off of hardware… it sorta makes sense that they are not motivated to make sure that older hardware isn’t going to wet the bed as progressive updates occur.
So maybe it isn’t planned… but they aren’t loosing sleep over people having to buy new hardware to correct the issue. And let’s face it… MOST people don’t blank out systems and start from scratch.
Per the Drobo… I have a 5N that started out with 1T drives and I have gradually upgraded over time and I am now starting on the 6T upgrades. Each member of the family has their own login and share for Time Machine. My issue wasn’t the drobo getting filled… it was time machine hitting a bad spot on the drive it was backing up to the drobo and causing a massive performance hit on the box.
2 Likes
it’s awesome now… when I wake the system up from sleep it doesn’t take 10 minutes for the machine to be semi-useful now.
Actually, that path is well tested. As well, old code (in the system) is axed.
What isn’t axed, are all the various stuff the user has installed on top of the system. Old startup items and old applications generally cruft up and cause all kinds of problems.
As well, the accumulation of preferences and other gunk in ~/Library can slow things down.
Apple also frequently optimizes for older machines.
If that were the case… a fresh install while using Migration Assistant would break the system all over. That’s not been my experience.
I pull EVERYTHING over with migration assistant. Even with spinning media if I do a bare metal install of the OS and migrate over the system is fine. If I do the multiple version OS updates it typically winds up hating life.
MA is doing a lot of cleanup along the way. A lot of stuff doesn’t get copied. As well, when you do upgrade -> upgrade -> upgrade, that maximizes the load on the filesystem; causes the most rapid change in a short amount of time, and it typically takes a while for the system to recover from that (it is kinda like defragging in the old days, but happens on the fly).
Also, after first boot, a bunch of processes have to run for a while to “catch up” with the new installation. That process is repeated with each install.
So, yeah, you’re going to end up with a cleaner system after migration assistant on a fresh install than upgrade -> upgrade -> upgrade.
And that was sort of my point… They can code around that and clean it up. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE, it’s just hard.
Having worked in the Industry now for 20+ years… I know what can and cannot be done… and I also used to make my living as an Interoperability Engineer so I know what gets tested and what doesn’t in the name of currency.
I have things like CleanMyMac to run a lot of the “hidden” scripts and I used to do a lot of that stuff manually back in the day. It still doesn’t clean the system properly.
I worked on OS X for quite a few years. ;). Now I work on the Apple TV for my day job.
I mainly take objection to the planned obsolescence claim. That isn’t true and a whole lot of effort is put into keeping older machines usable. There is a limit, though, of course.
And as you rightly point out, there is a certain amount of cumulative bit rot.
Most of – not all – of the various cleaners don’t really do much good at all. The one exception are the ones that clean up all the third party detritus left behind as apps come and go!
All in all, underscores why Glowforge (see! This can come back on topic!) chose a web based app. Interop via HTML5 in a web browser is a heck of a lot easier than trying to write a binary app for everything.
2 Likes
Being that I’ve worked in Support for Silicon Valley vendors for a long time… I guess I just have bias from knowing that MANY engineers don’t realize that there are actual end-users that will eventually use the products they are designing. My day job consists of telling Engineering and Development that they need to pull their heads out of the butts because there will be a customer that doesn’t know what they know trying to use the product tomorrow. =)
I can appreciate the Web App state of things… a lot faster to push new features out than having end-users either not install the updates at all or updating every 10 minutes.
1 Like