I have a MBP 2012 with a 5400 RPM Hard drive. Running TTP and Disk Utility indicate thee is no problem with the drive, however booting up and launching big apps such as MS office seem to take a while. Is this normal behavior for a hard drive based system and why everyone has moved to SSD?
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Failing hard drive or hard drive cable?
- Thread starter jwolf6589
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I need to save my money.
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Windows runs better with conventional hard drives.
An ssd is the way to go for a major increase in performance regardless of whether it is windows, Linux, or osx.
OP wrote:
"I need to save my money."
Very well.
You can have your current speeds, or, you can spend a little money (not much) and have MUCH FASTER speeds. As always, it's your choice.
You were complaining about "speeds".
I told you how to fix it.
You can buy a 256gb SSD for around $80. That will run as well as anything else.
If you have more than 256gb of "stuff", put the old drive into an external USB3 enclosure and use that, too.
"I need to save my money."
Very well.
You can have your current speeds, or, you can spend a little money (not much) and have MUCH FASTER speeds. As always, it's your choice.
You were complaining about "speeds".
I told you how to fix it.
You can buy a 256gb SSD for around $80. That will run as well as anything else.
If you have more than 256gb of "stuff", put the old drive into an external USB3 enclosure and use that, too.
I have 500GB of stuff. The problem seems to be when I install a new OS or reboot for the first time. Right now the Mac is fast and apps are opening and responding quickly.
It seems much faster now since I have booted up so I doubt its a hard drive cable.
Many of the 2012s with bad SATA cables we have checked in have had sporadic behavior where the system will slow down dramatically, then temporarily run normally, then repeat the process over again, and eventually the cable just gives out. Quite a few customers have mistaken this for App or OS corruption and have tried reinstalling Apps or the entire OS, which obviously does not fix the issue if it is a cable (or physical disk) failure.
I agree 100% SMART verification is the way to go - it's not perfect, but in many cases it not only predicts HDD/SSD failure, but can predict the SATA cable failure as well.
Werd.
Many of the 2012s with bad SATA cables we have checked in have had sporadic behavior where the system will slow down dramatically, then temporarily run normally, then repeat the process over again, and eventually the cable just gives out. Quite a few customers have mistaken this for App or OS corruption and have tried reinstalling Apps or the entire OS, which obviously does not fix the issue if it is a cable (or physical disk) failure.
I agree 100% SMART verification is the way to go - it's not perfect, but in many cases it not only predicts HDD/SSD failure, but can predict the SATA cable failure as well.
Werd.
Disk Utility and TTP say the SMART is fine.
The built-in SMART of macOS does not do a good job of predicting drive failure or alerting the User to SMART errors - the thresholds it uses must be different from other Apps I use. At least up through Sierra, macOS would report failing drives as 'Verified' and not alert the User to any trouble with somewhat startling regularity. (Even the more sensitive/user-accurate SMART programs don't always detect this.) I am not familiar with TTP?