Disk IO and throughput fixed in 10.7.4

[SimonTheSoundMa]

It appears that disk IO and throughput are back to the speeds of Snow Leopard. On my three MacBook Pro machines, two with 160GB HDDs get 40MB/s to 55MB/s, my other with 5000GB has gone from 50MB/s to 70MB/s. My Firewire drives now read/write at 75MB/s, up from 40MB/s.

This was major complaint when Lion was released, most people noticed a slow down in boot speed, IO has improved and the machine doesn't grind to a total halt when paging out.

I have also noticed that external HDDs now spin down when you eject them. No need to go in to Disk Utility to eject the whole drive (not the partition) from there to get the disk to spin down and park the head. No more unplug and pray your data didn't get corrupted.

 

[Bear]

...
This was major complaint when Lion was released, most people noticed a slow down in boot speed, IO has improved and the machine doesn't grind to a total halt when paging out.

I've noticed this as well. And it's a good thing.

.I have also noticed that external HDDs now spin down when you eject them. No need to go in to Disk Utility to eject the whole drive (not the partition) from there to get the disk to spin down and park the head. No more unplug and pray your data didn't get corrupted.

I don't think this was a universal problem. I know I never saw this with firewire drives.

 

[Blaine]

Woah, awesome news!

 

[throAU]

Yup, just confirming, seeing the same thing here.

If you're running an SSD 10.7.4 doesn't seem to make quite as much of a difference (gf on the 2010 air noticed no difference), but on my 15" 2011 pro it is night and day.

Also, the cooling fans seem to be a lot more sane with spin up and spin down - previously running a VM in Fusion would mean CPU fans spinning quite noisily fairly constantly, now they spin up only occasionally to 5000 rpm (not 6200) and back down fairly rapidly - most of time time my machine is relatively silent.

 

[randolorian]

Whatever they did to improve disk IO in 10.7.4 doesn't appear to have made it to 10.8 DP3 yet. On my MBP, I get about 52MB/s under 10.7.4 and 38MB/s under the latest ML preview.