Aftermarket SSD, slow bootup times, common solutions don't work

[zeemi]

Ok, so I pulled the trigger on a 256GB Samsung 840 PRO SSD a few days back and replaced my 15" Mid 2012 cMPB's 750GB HDD (7200 rpm) yesterday.

Eventually I'm planning to have the ssd in a caddy (still waiting for it to ship) replacing the superdrive and have the hdd in it's original position, but as the OS is going to run on the ssd and I wanted to install from scratch I just switched them out for the time being.

Let me first say, it's like having a brand new computer, I'm really impressed with the speeds. Photoshop opens up as fast as TextEdit did before the switch.

Everything is super fast and snappy, however, I can't say the same about boot times, they seem to vary anywhere from 0:45 to 1:15 minutes to the login screen (before I got about 1 minute).
I reset the pram/nvram, fixed all permissions and set the ssd as the startup disk, which seem to be the most common recommendations to slow ssd bootup times, to no avail as I still keep getting the same times.

What confuses me especially is how inconsistent the times are.

I don't think it has to do with the selection of the startup disk either, as the apple logo shows up fairly quickly.

The timeline looks something like this:
0:00 Press Power Button
0:05-0:08 Apple Logo Appears
0:10-0:15 Spinning Wheel Appears below Apple Logo
0:45-1:15 Login Screen Appears

so, as you can see, the largest part of time is spent on the spinning wheel part (I counted 20 spins last time, I have read others have as little as 3-4 spins).

I don't think the ssd is faulty, as everything else is extremly fast, I also measured the speeds and I'm getting about 480 write and 500 read (TRIM enabled).

Has anyone ever encountered similar problems? What else could cause this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[niteflyr]

Check "startup disk" settings in "system preferences". Make sure the new ssd is selected.

 

[ljx718]

Check "startup disk" settings in "system preferences". Make sure the new ssd is selected.

he specifically wrote that he did.

anyway, same thing was happening to me. could not fix the start up times but once in, everything was fine. i did all the steps you did and it was driving me crazy.

took it to apple store and turns out that the logic board needed to be replaced because some had failed.

what i did right before that happened was replace the cooling paste. i had done it with all 6 of my previous macbook pros and worked as a computer tech. i know what im doing and i was extremely careful like i always am.

thats the only thing i could think of that could have done something.

start up the mac holding "D" and run the long hardware test. mine failed.

 

[zeemi]

Thanks ljx718.

I just ran through the extended hardware tests and didn't get an error, I know those are not always 100% reliable, but it feels more like a software than hardware issue to me, just because it works so fast in all other cases.

I also posted to apple's discussion boards and I'm gonna see if anything comes up there.

Thanks for your help.

Maybe I should just try to reinstall the operating system (although I'm not looking forward to going through all that again...).