Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Subjectively - how slow is iMac 21.5" 5400rpm disk?
- Thread starter erikbailey
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Two imacs, two macbooks, a powerbook, a mini, two ipads. I think your liking apple biases you towards my posts. I don't mind you thinking my posts are horse manure btw, it's a free country.. I was making some points though with arguments you are doing an ad hominem instead.
Last edited:
My wife's 4-5yr old iMac felt like it was on its last legs (it was unbearably slow to me), however when I took out the 5400RPM Hard Drive and replaced it with a SSD it has given the computer a whole new lease of life, it's incredible just how much of a difference replacing that ONE component has made.
I just don't think a 5400RPM hard drive cuts it in this day and age as a primary boot drive. It's just Apple trying to get you to buy a more expensive model because the cost to Apple of supplying at least a 7200RPM drive is minimal, it's a marketing decision to get people to buy the next model up.
I just don't think a 5400RPM hard drive cuts it in this day and age as a primary boot drive. It's just Apple trying to get you to buy a more expensive model because the cost to Apple of supplying at least a 7200RPM drive is minimal, it's a marketing decision to get people to buy the next model up.
I am an 21.5 inch base model owner. My reason for buying an imac has always been the design factor and because this machine has the best large display you can find in the market at an affordable price point (at least for now). Performance has never been an read important factor for me, and this machine has been very adaquate so far.
However i think in a few months i will buy a LaCie rugged 120GB thunderbolt SSD drive and use it as the boot drive.
Indeed - agree with that. And I realized I had a typo in my post with the Crucial URL - I meant 4GBx2 - got my 4 and 2 mixed up...
It really comes down to what you are used to.
I don't have experience with the 5400rpm drive in the new iMac, however I do with the new Mac mini. When I first got the 2.3ghz i7 Mac mini I was really put off by how slow it "felt". The SSD I had ordered hadn't arrived yet. It booted slow, launched apps slow, iTunes was slow, iPhoto was slow, Mail was slow (several large accounts), booting or restarting my VMWare instances slow. I did a side by side comparison with my 2010 13" MBP (which has a 128gb SSD) and the mini was much slower than in those tasks that I pretty much do every day (except booting). I then installed the SSD and the thing flies.
Also in black magic bench marks, the 1tb 5400rpm drive in the Mac mini is about 30-50% slower than the 1tb 7200rpm drive in my 2011 i7 21.5" iMac.
I don't have experience with the 5400rpm drive in the new iMac, however I do with the new Mac mini. When I first got the 2.3ghz i7 Mac mini I was really put off by how slow it "felt". The SSD I had ordered hadn't arrived yet. It booted slow, launched apps slow, iTunes was slow, iPhoto was slow, Mail was slow (several large accounts), booting or restarting my VMWare instances slow. I did a side by side comparison with my 2010 13" MBP (which has a 128gb SSD) and the mini was much slower than in those tasks that I pretty much do every day (except booting). I then installed the SSD and the thing flies.
Also in black magic bench marks, the 1tb 5400rpm drive in the Mac mini is about 30-50% slower than the 1tb 7200rpm drive in my 2011 i7 21.5" iMac.
Thanks - that's exactly what I'm looking for. iTunes is a huge reason for this new machine, and it's sluggish enough on its own that I don't want anything slowing it down further.
At this point, I'm completely sold on the SSD. Odds are 90+% I'll do it via a mini, since the total cost is several hundred less than an equivalent iMac.
More opinions don't always mean they are correct. Toms hardware website has good info on this also.thanks for the link, I 'll have a look at it.
one other data point for you. I had responded earlier. I have the base 21.5 . Specific to iTunes, my library is just over 23000 songs and 125 movies. Itunes launches in about 4 seconds (two bounces in the dock). I have no idea how my library compares to yours, but 4 seconds seemed reasonable to me.
I also have not noticed any lag in scrolling through my collection, even when listing by songs which seems to be the slowest mode for iTunes.
Hope that is helpful
I think it can be very much horses for courses. I work for a national organisation with thousands of employees, no SSD for us, we are on a virtual network with the servers based over a hundred miles away. Personally, my iMac uses sleep and is ready for use in seconds and my Windows 8 Lappy has a total cold boot time of 9 seconds so who needs SSD?
Wow...take it easy buddy.
If you want your opinion to go unchallenged you might not want to post in forums. You claimed that you and your boss were the superior experts and the rest were nitwits of the...
...so save me the "superior than thou" lecture.
What you said is simply untrue for ssds which boost daily performance and productivity veeery noticeably. No one is talking here about overclocked cpu or ram. And they can come within a hybrid drive, or can be as small as 32gbs for os and apps, the rest can go in the hd drive for storage. So users can get the best of both worlds, for a minimal cost, and they don't have to buy a 1tb ssd.
And what the hell is blackmagic?
A couple of things jump out at me.
First, the article is 6 years old.
Second, the article compares 15K vs 10K and then 7.2K, and is juggling capacity as well as speed, and talking about price/performance. It's all interesting enough, but has nothing to do with whether a 5400 is effectively slower than a 7200.
I've had 15K drives and 10K drives (SCSI, in my AlphaServer) and they were low capacity but they did what they needed to. In their day, they were dynamite. Now, a joke -- the 15K drive is 18 gb.
There's really no comparison there -- what's needed is a reasonable comparison between 5400 and 7200 drives of the same or at least similar capacity.
Wow, you just can't help yourself can you?
And just to be clear, what I posted was not anger but unfiltered contempt specifically for you......
Whatever snowman, Merry Christmas and take her easy with your unfiltered contempt for "elite haxxors" and other forum members. And get an sdd too snowman or a hybrid and enjoy your machine flying, and you can thank me later.
One other option for you: buy a used 2011 iMac that can you can install an SSD into. Despite the rumors, it's not hard; I just did it on a mid-2010. You'll get several years of solid use out of it.
think twice
2 friends that got Mini's earlier in the year (2012) because they didn't want to wait for the a new iMac regret it... mostly due to the graphics card.
external drives over thunderbolt can be just as fast as internal mini... so don't fret.
Thanks - as with all of the replies, that's very helpful. Maybe I should do a mini after all (which I can easily upgrade to an SSD)... Decisions, decisions!
2 friends that got Mini's earlier in the year (2012) because they didn't want to wait for the a new iMac regret it... mostly due to the graphics card.
external drives over thunderbolt can be just as fast as internal mini... so don't fret.
I've just ordered 28 of the base model for my department at work. I'm not so much bothered about them not being SSD, what i'm more bothered about is whether it is actually slower than the 7200rpm drive in the 2011 base model that it replaced. Mostly for starting up and opening applications, as everything else for us will be network based anyway, even user folders. I'm hoping to do a video of boot times comparisons between the 2011 and 2012 base models when we get them, as everyone who has done these comparisons has focused on the Fusion Drive.
I would be interested to hear as well because a 2.5" laptop drive should be considerably slower than a 3.5" desktop drive.
johnnyturbouk
macrumors 68000
99% Confidence Intervals of me hating going back to a spinning drive, let alone a 5400rpm at that: 10!
Gosh, replacing 2011 hardware that runs on a network already? Our organisation has a ten year turn around on "Enterprise Windows hardware" - we too run a virtual network, and we are still using XP.
Oh no we're not that quick unfortunately. We just have a long update cycle like you have, we're just replacing two rooms of iMac G5's from 2004 that have been circling the drain for a couple of years now
I wanted to update folks on what I ended up deciding on (after much back-and-forthing!
)... Have ordered a base mini, with 128GB SSD (OCZ Vertex 4) to be installed next to the stock 500GB in a Fusion arrangement (with kit from ifixit), and 8GB RAM upgrade (Crucial). Monitor will be Dell U2412 (1920x1200). I have a LaCie 2x1TB TB RAID disk that I will use for storage beyond the internal.This gives me what I need (solid media and file server that functions well as a family computer) as well as what I want (fast primary disk).
Thanks for all the help! --Erik