MP 1,1-5,1 cMP is fast but slow

[MacProM@ne]

I’m having a strange issue where my 4,1-5,1 with twin x5690 is moving incredibly slow, but geekbench 3 shows 28,000+ on multicore. Like if I want to launch my browser app, I click it and nothing for 10 secs, then it bounces for 2mins then it launches and the internet doesn’t work because it seems to time out. This is for every app, even like VLC. Spotlight searches are super fast. Finder is fast.

As a side note, I’ve had to play with the tension on the heatsink bolts on the processor tray today because I was having RAM not recognized, then only a single processor recognized etc. Now everything is recognized and the tension seems about right at slightly snugged.

But honestly my suspicion lies on the m.2 drive as all my applications are stored on it while all my media files are stored on hdd which are still fast when I preview (spacebar preview) them or open with QuickTime (but not fast with VLC). I have a samsung 970evo, less than a year old, 500gb. So I decided to test the theory and copied the VLC app to my hdd and that took longer than it should, then I tried to launch the app and it took 15 mins to “verify” the app for first launch. Any thoughts?

 

[nobullone1964]

I would scan for malware and adware. Better yet, do a clean OS installation.

 

[Macschrauber]

Use a tool like drive dx to check the smart values of the blade.

 

[MacProM@ne]

Scanned for malware, and scanned with drive dx. No issues with either. Disk utility First Aid shows OK also.

Then I booted into recovery mode and selected Install a new copy of MacOS, and none of my drives were available. When I clicked on them it said "Your computer needs a firmware update to install to this volume. Choose a Mac OS Extended Journaled volume instead."

 

[MacProM@ne]

I should add that this drive and processor tray was swapped into another tower. But this tower was already running mojave with 5,1 and 144.0.0.0. (It currently shows those values as well.) It was working perfectly fine with mojave, and was very fast. All drives are in APFS format. RAM is in triple channel, 48gb 1333. I have the newest version of OpenCore and kexts running on Catalina.

 

[h9826790]

Then I booted into recovery mode and selected Install a new copy of MacOS, and none of my drives were available. When I clicked on them it said "Your computer needs a firmware update to install to this volume. Choose a Mac OS Extended Journaled volume instead."

Turn on VMM, and turn off SMBIOS spoofing.

 

[jscipione]

Scanned for malware, and scanned with drive dx. No issues with either. Disk utility First Aid shows OK also.

Then I booted into recovery mode and selected Install a new copy of MacOS, and none of my drives were available. When I clicked on them it said "Your computer needs a firmware update to install to this volume. Choose a Mac OS Extended Journaled volume instead."

That message is normal for Catalina on a classic Mac Pro, and is not accurate. You’ll have to “Turn on VMM, and turn off SMBIOS spoofing.” as h9826790 indicated to get past that. But considering you are trying to fix speed problems, upgrading to Catalina will only exacerbate your problem, as the VMM spoofing required for Catalina can introduce its own speed issues.

I suspect that there is some problem indexing your spinning hard drives that is causing the slowdown problem. First thing I would do is take out all the hard drives and boot up with just the SSD and see if that fixes the problem. If so, then you’ll have narrowed down the problem to the hard drives. Once that is done, put the hard drives back in, go into Spotlight in System Preferences, add the hard drive volumes to the spotlight index exception list in the Privacy tab, reboot, then remove the drive from the spotlight exception list, and that will force spotlight to reindex the volume and (hopefully) fix the problem.

 

[MacProM@ne]

Wow! You hit the nail right on the head. I had been having problems with my spotlight recently and reindexed the boot drive recently. It fixed my previous issues perfectly, but it must’ve caused these problems at the same time. I wouldn’t have guessed that my applications which are stored on NVMe would be affected by my unrelated storage drives, but that’s exactly what was happening. Many many thanks to you friend!