Clean-install on MBA - why sooooooo slowwww? How to diag?

[cognus]

hi folks this is an embarrassing problem for me - I actually am somewhat familiar/ experienced with intel-Mac but my own MBA just performs AWFUL. It is a MBA7.2, 1.6GHZ i5 4GB RAM, Boot ROM 427.0, SMC v 2.27f2, Catalina 10.15.7.

I attempted, briefly, to run Big Sur to help with a project I was doing for a friend, but it was still early at that time and very very buggy [though apple released it by that point]. Literally too slow to function. So, I wiped everything, prepped a usb installer, and installed Catalina clean-install on the drive, freshly-formatted with APFS [Disk U Erase/APFS]. I deliberately keep this one on a work account that has no other apple dependencies: no iphone, no anything, just a squeaky clean lean account that only serves as a work mule to get Apple technicals done.

This has zero startup programs loading; nothing but core apple macos defaults running at startup.
The i5 based hardware is more than sufficient but the 'feel' of the performance is like it has both a dying SSD AND the processor is throttled. Neither seems to be the actual case. The SSD checks out healthy, and running the default system diags from a diags-startup yields no clues. By Contrast, i prepped for my daughter the exact same MBA configuration running Catalina. Hers performs as you would hope - not like lightning but pretty peppy. Side by side you would think my own diseased by comparison.

how do I properly figure this out?

 

[DeltaMac]

I have a MBA7,2 - but a 2017, 8GB RAM.

I would "cast your eye-of-doubt" at the Apple-provided storage card.
I swapped out the original SATA card for a PCIe/NVME card. It just needs a cheap Sintech adapter.
I am getting ready to swap out the Seagate card I have been using for several months, and going with a W-D 500GB SN750
Price just dropped recently, so $60 for the card, plus the necessary adapter, used a Sintech adapter - works great for an additional $15.
Came from Apple with 128GB, so upgraded to 500GB for less than $75.
Works great - fast boot. I am currently using it for my Monterey beta test system, so my use case is a bit different from yours. But, I have no complaints about performance with that.

 

[Isamilis]

Ho

hi folks this is an embarrassing problem for me - I actually am somewhat familiar/ experienced with intel-Mac but my own MBA just performs AWFUL. It is a MBA7.2, 1.6GHZ i5 4GB RAM, Boot ROM 427.0, SMC v 2.27f2, Catalina 10.15.7.

I attempted, briefly, to run Big Sur to help with a project I was doing for a friend, but it was still early at that time and very very buggy [though apple released it by that point]. Literally too slow to function. So, I wiped everything, prepped a usb installer, and installed Catalina clean-install on the drive, freshly-formatted with APFS [Disk U Erase/APFS]. I deliberately keep this one on a work account that has no other apple dependencies: no iphone, no anything, just a squeaky clean lean account that only serves as a work mule to get Apple technicals done.

This has zero startup programs loading; nothing but core apple macos defaults running at startup.
The i5 based hardware is more than sufficient but the 'feel' of the performance is like it has both a dying SSD AND the processor is throttled. Neither seems to be the actual case. The SSD checks out healthy, and running the default system diags from a diags-startup yields no clues. By Contrast, i prepped for my daughter the exact same MBA configuration running Catalina. Hers performs as you would hope - not like lightning but pretty peppy. Side by side you would think my own diseased by comparison.

how do I properly figure this out?

How much ram is your daughter’s MacBook? Probably is due to 4gb ram.

 

[cognus]

Ho

How much ram is your daughter’s MacBook? Probably is due to 4gb ram.

they are both the same - identical as to processor and ram. I have not checked the drives but they are the same size at any rate. I installed catalina the same way on both, after trying to run Big Sur on my own and as said, at that point [about 3 updates ago] it was not just buggy but impossible. It would "run", but doing any task no matter how trivial took an enormous amount of time so I ditched Big Sur and retreated to Catalina.

 

[cognus]

I have a MBA7,2 - but a 2017, 8GB RAM.

I would "cast your eye-of-doubt" at the Apple-provided storage card.
I swapped out the original SATA card for a PCIe/NVME card. It just needs a cheap Sintech adapter.
I am getting ready to swap out the Seagate card I have been using for several months, and going with a W-D 500GB SN750
Price just dropped recently, so $60 for the card, plus the necessary adapter, used a Sintech adapter - works great for an additional $15.
Came from Apple with 128GB, so upgraded to 500GB for less than $75.
Works great - fast boot. I am currently using it for my Monterey beta test system, so my use case is a bit different from yours. But, I have no complaints about performance with that.

oh, can you also provide a link to the adapter you used? I would do that in a heartbeat

i have been suspicious of the drive but how to prove that it is the culprit?
Is it possible that the way the drive is organized is non-optimal, which was all 'automated' by the Catalina installer? I am not skilled in APFS

 

[DeltaMac]

I suppose you could try some third-party drive testing utility, such as that in Drive Genius, or Techtool Pro.
The good utilities would cost more than simply deciding that the drive may be not working nicely, and you might try to swap out to another drive.
You can get the Sintech adapter (which I have used several times in the last year) directly from the Sintech store, or from Amazon. I've not ordered from sites other than Amazon, but I'm sure you can find other places as well.
I use the tiny model, but there is a full-length card adapter, too, which does pretty much the same trick, adapting a standard m.2/NVMe card to an Apple logic board slot.
(I have swapped out the Seagate that I used for a few months, for a Western Digital SN750 500GB. It is measurably (and noticeably) faster than the Seagate, and about 2x faster than the original !! )

 

[now i see it]

Since you've got two identical machines and one is messed up even with a clean install, clearly the crippled one has hardware problems (that a customer can't fix).
Only course of action is send it back to apple for a repair estimate or replace it.

 

[appltech]

Hi! Have you checked if something's happening in the background with the help of Activity monitor or other tools? It looks like your mac might be busy with some kind of sync or something of the sort. All the info about Activity Monitor and ways to use it can be found in the article