Resolved Computer faster with Windows 8.1 (bootcamp)

[Mohammed1]

Hey guys just a quick question : Why is my imac 27 inch late 2013 ALOT faster on my windows bootcamp partition than it is on my regular OSX Yosemite? I would think that apple's software would work best on apple's hardware but it turns out I'm wrong! Any answer is apreciated

Specs and other info:

Processor: Intel i5-4570 @ 3.20 ghz
Memory: 8 GB
Windows: 8.1 (64 bit)

 

[e93to]

This is quite funny... lol.

Win 7 ran fine on my late 2012 iMac, but I didn't notice it is faster than 10.8.5 that came with the computer. Vista runs ok on my MBP, but laptop makes a lot of noises... And it's quite slow...

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Yosemite isn't optimized for thr spinny HDD in your iMac. Windows is designed to run fast on obsolete enterprise PCs. Hence it runs better on an HDD that OS X.

 

[Mohammed1]

Yosemite isn't optimized for thr spinny HDD in your iMac. Windows is designed to run fast on obsolete enterprise PCs. Hence it runs better on an HDD that OS X.

Thank you for the help but I think apple should have at least warned us while upgrading to Yosemite because it takes me around 3-4 minutes to boot up on my mac that I spent £1600 on! But at least Windows works better.

 

[cynics]

Yosemite isn't optimized for thr spinny HDD in your iMac. Windows is designed to run fast on obsolete enterprise PCs. Hence it runs better on an HDD that OS X.

Do you have a source for this?

Black Magic indicates near identical RW for me.

You just make it sound like for some reason Yosemite is incapable of handling this trivial task because its new and modern rather then poorly designed (which like I mentioned isn't the case for me).

Maybe the Windows partition is on the outer edge of the platter?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Do you have a source for this?

Black Magic indicates near identical RW for me.

You just make it sound like for some reason Yosemite is incapable of handling this trivial task because its new and modern rather then poorly designed (which like I mentioned isn't the case for me).

Maybe the Windows partition is on the outer edge of the platter?

OS X is supposed to optimize the location of files on the HDD, as least it used to. So if OS X is putting the Windows partition in the location marked as the fastest read/write spot on the HDD, that's a failure on Apple's part.

As to my source for Yosemite handling terribly on spinning HDD's? Just experience.

Yosemite is blazing fast on old hardware with an SSD, but if you put it on newer hardware but with an HDD - such as a new 27" iMac that has a 1tb HDD - it gets very slow, very fast.

At work, I have a mac with 8gb of RAM and a quad core CPU - monitoring my CPU usage shows it's never over 50%, and my RAM usage is around 6gb max, so I'm not really resource constrained no matter what I'm doing... but the OS is just slow. Computers with slower CPU's and less RAM (such as the new MacBook) run Yosemite faster though. Coincidence? I think not.

I don't think that HDD read/writes have slown down, but rather OS X tends to cache much less aggressively, so the OS needs to do more read/writes, which has the "side effect" of making your old computer feel slower that it would otherwise.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

OS X is supposed to optimize the location of files on the HDD, as least it used to. So if OS X is putting the Windows partition in the location marked as the fastest read/write spot on the HDD, that's a failure on Apple's part.

As to my source for Yosemite handling terribly on spinning HDD's? Just experience.

Yosemite is blazing fast on old hardware with an SSD, but if you put it on newer hardware but with an HDD - such as a new 27" iMac that has a 1tb HDD - it gets very slow, very fast.

At work, I have a mac with 8gb of RAM and a quad core CPU - monitoring my CPU usage shows it's never over 50%, and my RAM usage is around 6gb max, so I'm not really resource constrained no matter what I'm doing... but the OS is just slow. Computers with slower CPU's and less RAM (such as the new MacBook) run Yosemite faster though. Coincidence? I think not.

I don't think that HDD read/writes have slown down, but rather OS X tends to cache much less aggressively, so the OS needs to do more read/writes, which has the "side effect" of making your old computer feel slower that it would otherwise.

I have to disagree with your experience, or at least comment on my experience being completely different from yours. I have a 21.5" iMac with a 1TB HDD and Yosemite works perfectly fine for me with the Hard Drive (launching applications...) but my Windows 8.1 partition can have some pretty high disk usage when running (I can have it use 100% disk usage on Windows and its Windows processes taking it up, although this is mainly when I wake from sleep). That is why I now install my games on an external HDD, so that Windows and other applications can get the 100MB read write potential of the internal Hard Drive, and my games get the 110MB read write potential of the external.

I can also comment (in my experience and not official testing of course) that my iMac with a Hard Drive launched applications a little slower the speed of a 15" Macbook Pro Retina 2012 (the first retina model), but those came with SATA SSD's and at the time were not insanely faster than Hard Drives like the PCIe SSD's of todays MacBooks. Boot times were still faster with the Macbook and SSD though.


Just my experience, although I can safely say that Windows beats Mac OS on boot up times from a hard drive (and destroys it if I boot from that petition if it were hibernated). When I am coming out of Windows and going back to Yosemite, I usually hibernate Windows and when I come back to Windows, it boots in 8 seconds. Would be great to have an official hibernate on Mac OS to do the same thing.

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Thank you for the help but I think apple should have at least warned us while upgrading to Yosemite because it takes me around 3-4 minutes to boot up on my mac that I spent £1600 on! But at least Windows works better.

Ok, thats a little weird? Could you do a disk speed test with your iMacs Hard Drive (there is free app on the app store called Black Magic Disk Speed Test) And post the results. My iMac with a Hard Drive (at around 60% full) takes around 45-50 seconds to boot up, and on Mavericks/Mountain Lion it taken 35 seconds.

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Maybe the Windows partition is on the outer edge of the platter?

Very possible, especially with a 4 minute boot for Yosemite. OP, how large did you make the Partition for Windows 8.1?

 

[Mohammed1]

Hey thanks for the replies I will do the benchmarking later as I don't have any time now but my hard drive is split 50/50 (500gb each). Recently the boot ups got faster on mac to around 2 minutes I don't know why because I haven't been using mac at all which is extremely weird but I don't have a clue why.

 

[Mohammed1]

Here it is:

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

Here it is:

Nothing wrong with those speeds, that is just to make sure, the internal drive? And do you have many processes of applications to launch on start up on Yosemite?

 

[G4DP]

Try putting 7 on a different HD. For speed it blows Mac OSX out of the water.

Sadly Mac OS X doesn't seem to be optimised for anything other than the latest and greatest Hardware.

Where as my 7 year old machine scores 7.8 on the window experience analysis. The only thing stoping it from being 7.9 is the slow HD.

 

[cynics]

OS X is supposed to optimize the location of files on the HDD, as least it used to. So if OS X is putting the Windows partition in the location marked as the fastest read/write spot on the HDD, that's a failure on Apple's part.

As to my source for Yosemite handling terribly on spinning HDD's? Just experience.

Yosemite is blazing fast on old hardware with an SSD, but if you put it on newer hardware but with an HDD - such as a new 27" iMac that has a 1tb HDD - it gets very slow, very fast.

At work, I have a mac with 8gb of RAM and a quad core CPU - monitoring my CPU usage shows it's never over 50%, and my RAM usage is around 6gb max, so I'm not really resource constrained no matter what I'm doing... but the OS is just slow. Computers with slower CPU's and less RAM (such as the new MacBook) run Yosemite faster though. Coincidence? I think not.

I don't think that HDD read/writes have slown down, but rather OS X tends to cache much less aggressively, so the OS needs to do more read/writes, which has the "side effect" of making your old computer feel slower that it would otherwise.

Hmm. I don't know if we are disagreeing or agreeing. Lol.

I have a 2013 iMac i5/775m/7200 HDD at home. And a 2014 5k iMac i7/m295/SSD at work.

Windows is faster on both of them for most task that take any measurable amount of time. Not ALWAYS the case but I would say the majority of the time.

So its not like Windows is better with reading a HDD then Yosemite. It (in my very limited experience) is just faster at booting regardless of medium.

 

[ha1o2surfer]

Here it is:

Those speeds don't matter when it comes to performance sorry to say. a HD's 4k write performance aka how fast it can read many small files is more important. This test is basically showing how fast a drive can read and write 1 contiguous file which for a HD takes little work as the head is moving sequentially and not all over the place. It takes time for HD to move it's head to find a small file where as the SSD finds it almost instantly.