Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Poll: Only for HDD non-SSD users: Is your Lion 10.7.4 experience - good, bad, neutral

Lion on HDD Macs, what's your experience? (Users of SSD drives, please do not vote.)

  • Lion is fast on an HDD drive, faster than Snow Leopard.

    Votes: 6 18.2%

  • Lion on HDD drive is about the same speed as Snow Leopard

    Votes: 21 63.6%

  • Lion on HDD is a dog, slower than Snow Leopard

    Votes: 6 18.2%
  • Total voters
    33
K

katewes

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2007
465
146
This poll is ONLY for people that use Mac Lion 10.7 in a Mac with a conventional hard disk drive (HDD). It is NOT for users who have Solid State Drives (SSD).

Please, I repeat, if you have a Mac with SSD, do NOT vote on this poll.

The reason is that, as I've reviewed online user reports, there are many people who find Lion to be quite good, but many have bad experiences too. The big picture emerges that SSD users have a good Lion experience, and that Lion seems optimised for SSD use. Therefore, I want specifically to know how HDD users are finding the current version of Lion 10.7.4

I made a link https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1373660/ on this same topic - asking for any positive comments about Lion by HDD users - but there was only one response from a HDD user. It wasn't clear to me what the scarcity of positive comments meant, so I'm creating this poll.
 
Last edited:
PurrBall

PurrBall

macrumors 65816
Oct 25, 2007
1,015
54
Indianapolis
I'm finding 10.7.4 a LOT better on my iMac. Almost Snow Leopard fast once the system is fully operational. I've found on my MBP that Mountain Lion takes care of the slow bootup and memory/swap issues.
 
P

PNW

macrumors regular
Feb 7, 2007
192
0
Compared to Snow Leopard it's a dog. They totally hosed the memory management. I'm still having issues with inactive memory not being released when required. Last restart was when I upgraded Safari on Monday. I came home today and was greeted with beach balls close to 4 out of 6 gigs of RAM inactive and ~32 Gigs Page ins and ~ 20 Gigs page outs. I'm running purge 2 - 3 times a week. I can see where if you have a SSD using your HD for RAM isn't that big of a deal but for those of use with conventional drives it's a nightmare.
 
wrldwzrd89

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
Lion for me is faster overall on a HDD, particularly at booting. Boot time went down from ~25 seconds with Snow Leopard to ~15 seconds with Lion. The speed improvement isn't without its downsides - most notably some audio bugs that directly impact my workflow. One of them is a MIDI bug that I suspect Apple won't ever fix... the other one causes audio files shorter than 1 second in length to get cut off prematurely when played back. Oddly enough, this only affects 16-bit audio; 8-bit audio is unaffected. Playing affected audio files with QuickTime Player 7 (which doesn't use the buggy API) also works normally.
 
talmy

talmy

macrumors 601
Oct 26, 2009
4,726
332
Oregon
Once I trained myself to use Command-W to close windows rather than Command-Q to shut down the app, I've found Lion very fast. With all those apps running, shutdown and restart is slowed, but I spend most of my time running the computer and not starting it. (I just close the lid on my MacBook Pro when I go from one location to another, and I never shut down my iMac).
 
K

katewes

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2007
465
146
I'm the OP for this thread. Before installing Lion, I was concerned about the large number of reports about Lion being slow etc. but in the forums I found tips on how to ensure that the Lion install went well.

So before doing a clean install, I used Disk Utility to do a pass to overwrite the data. Then I did a clean install from a Lion startup DVD (plenty of instructions on youtube).

Then I only installed apps that were said to be Lion-compatible as per http://www.roaringapps.com

I've kept the HD with a large empty space. So far I've only loaded the data I need for daily work, and not all the junk that takes up disk space. I read that Lion needs a lot of free disk space because it uses that free space for virtual memory tasks.

Also it probably helps that my first clean install of Lion is with 10.7.4 - with many earlier bugs dealt with.

I also have 8GB of RAM. I read that Lion needs a lot of memory.

After a brief hiccup with Lion Mail (where I didn't follow the instructions precisely), I can say Lion is about the same as Snow Leopard in terms of speed.
 
Drew017

Drew017

macrumors 65816
May 29, 2011
1,254
11
East coast, USA
yea, I've read about the tons of RAM that Lion uses, but fro me, upon boot up, it uses about 3/4 of a gig of RAM. I'm not sure why my experience is so much better than what I've read about...
 
M

-MRB

macrumors 6502
Jul 1, 2010
414
0
UK
I've not used snow leopard before BUT I think my boot time has increased after the update.

It might be a placebo though
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom