How come my i5 MBP boots/shuts down faster than my Mac Pro?

[Sharky II]

Any ideas?

I have a fresh install of 10.6.3 on a 1TB Samsung F3 drive in my 8 x 2.8GHz Mac Pro (2008) with 6GB ram. The boot up time on this drive (and on my 10.5.8 drive) is much slower than my MBP (i5 2.53, 4GB ram, 7200rpm 500gb HD).

Is this normal?

I'd of imagined the Mac Pro would always be faster!

The Mac Pro does have more stuff attached to it and inside it, it's driving 2 screens, has 2 bootable drives + 2 data drives etc, though.

Cheers

E

 

[SmilesLots]

Could be the hard drive and where the boot info is stored on the drive - outer sectors are faster. Just my thoughts. Maybe nanofrog knows for sure. And as you said, the Pro has all that overhead. I also understand that the more ram you have, the longer it takes to boot, since the OS checks he ram on boot.

 

[foidulus]

Could be a lot of things, in general the mac pro has a lot more hardware to probe and test. Also depending on how many devices you have hooked up to the thing it may have to load a lot more kernel extensions.

These take time to load and that is why it boots up slower. If fast boot time is important to you, stick an SSD inside the mac pro and put the root OS X drive on there, I guarentee it will boot faster than your hd-based mbp!

 

[Murray M]

It could be that the i5 is faster.

They really should consider updating that MP, you know.

 

[666sheep]

Is your MP boot time annoying or you just wonder? Difference between MP and MBP is big? First try PRAM reset in MP (sometimes helps in this issue) and select boot drive i Sys Prefs to OS X drive (at least ensure that is set correctly).

Rest was perfectly described above by foidulus.

 

[Vylen]

Wait... people turn off their Mac Pro's?

 

[chiefroastbeef]

Wait... people turn off their Mac Pro's?

Yep! I am away on business, my Mac Pro and Drobo is turned off and unplugged.

 

[aiqw9182]

It could be that the i5 is faster.

They really should consider updating that MP, you know.

Is this a joke? You think a hyperthreaded dual core MacBook Pro is faster than an eight core Mac Pro?

Anyway, did you clean install Snow Leopard on that Mac Pro? If not, then that's the reason. Also make sure you have the drive you are comparing selected in system preferences by going to the startup disk preference and check how many processes you have running in the background as well as how many startup items you have.