How Long To Boot Up?

[Dronecatcher]

Today, someone in the Low End Mac Facebook group posted about this, citing speeds of MacBooks booting and launching Safari, so as I had my G4 iMac handy I thought I'd give it a whirl.

From cold, booting and loading Safari home page (Google): 48 seconds.

The iMac is the 800Mhz G4, 15" model, 5400RPM HDD, 768Mb RAM running OSX 10.4.11.

iMac set to automatically login and Safari as a login item - connecting to web via a third party USB wifi adaptor...speed would've been quicker had I been connected via Ethernet.

I don't put much store by boot times but even so, fun comparision with the mighty MacBooks taking nearly one and a half minutes

 

[amagichnich]

Of the ones I have around me right now:

1. TiBook 1Ghz 1MB L3, 1GB RAM, 4200rpm HDD, OS X 10.4.11 : 59 seconds
2. iBook G4 1.33Ghz 14“ 1.25GB RAM, 4200rpm HDD, OS X 10.4.11 : 66 seconds
   
3. iBook G4 1.33Ghz 12“ 1.5GB RAM, SSD, OS X 10.4.11 : 47 seconds
4. AlBook G4 1.67Ghz 15“ 1.5GB RAM, SSD, OS X 10.4.11 : 52 seconds

I for one find this quite interesting. The 12" always felt to be the fastest of them, not only regarding boot time. The 14" however is by far the coolest/coldest running of them.
Obviously an SSD makes not that much of a difference in boot times. That leads me to the next question:
Does a 4200rpm HDD use the full bandwith of the P-ATA / EIDE / Ultra-ATA controller / channel?
In my experience the HDDs are able to deliver around 20-30MB/s (40MB/s SSD, as seen in ActivityMonitor) whereas the last EIDE standard Ultra-DMA 6 (Ultra-ATA-133 / ATA-7) was specified (in 2001) for 133MB/s - therefore an SSD should definitely be an improvement.
Alas, Apple was a bit slow in implementing newer EIDE versions :

1. 2002 device : Ultra-ATA-66 : 66.66MB/s
2. 2004 device : Ultra-ATA-100 : 99.99MB/s
3. 2005 device : Ultra-ATA-100 : 99.99MB/s
4. 2005 device : Ultra-ATA-100 : 99.99MB/s

--> the controller at least is not at all at it's limits. Who is? The OS? The HDD? CPU?

Maybe Xbench can help (for comparison I chose sequential uncached read 256K blocks):

1. 21.26 MB/s
2. 24.65 MB/s
3. 83.30 MB/s
4. 79.18 MB/s

Not bad! An SSD seems to be worth it after startup. But what happens during startup? Could the CPU be the bottleneck?
Compare the 1Ghz TiBook with the 1.67 AlBook: 59 vs 52, that's too close. Again this proves that neither the controller nor the HDD are the bottleneck. RAM/Memory transfer rate is too similar on all of them. Also keep in mind that the TiBook uses SDRAM where the others use DDR-SDRAM.

Is it the OS? Maybe the OS can't use that much speed as there are too many small files and dependencies... I don't know, but If anyone knows - help me. Please.

Attached are the Xbench results, feel free to include them in your "library"
Attached is also the Xbench of the Mac Mini I use as a daily driver for "comon" tasks (T4F, iTunes, Word, Excel, Entourage, NotationalVelocity + FTP/AFP/PhotoSync/iTunes server) but as I can't really shut it down without loosing too much data (and time) and it is running Leopard I didn't include it above.

A picture of the bottom specifications of the 1.5 Ghz Mini...

(Regarding any technical info: feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)

 

[pl1984]

Which MacBook generation are you referring to? The initial MacBook models or the current models?

Here are my benchmarks:

MacBook 2,1: 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB, 5400RPM SATA HD, OS X 10.6.0, 33 seconds
MacBook 9,1: 1.2Ghz Core m5, 8GB, 512GB AHCI PCIe HD, macOS 10.12.6, 28 seconds​

Interesting the much newer model was only five seconds faster (but had a much newer, and I assume, resource intensive OS).

 

[amagichnich]

Which MacBook generation are you referring to? The initial MacBook models or the current models?

Here are my benchmarks:

MacBook 2,1: 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB, 5400RPM SATA HD, OS X 10.6.0, 33 seconds
MacBook 9,1: 1.2Ghz Core m5, 8GB, 512GB AHCI PCIe HD, macOS 10.12.6, 28 seconds​

Interesting the much newer model was only five seconds faster (but had a much newer, and I assume, resource intensive OS).

MacBook Core 2 Duo 1.83, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD, OS X 10.6.8 : 25.28 seconds!! long live the Snow Leoaprd

 

[eyoungren]

A picture of the bottom specifications of the 1.5 Ghz Mini...
View attachment 775199

Ethenet?

Missing an 'r'…

 

[Dronecatcher]

Obviously an SSD makes not that much of a difference in boot times. That leads me to the next question:

I'd have thought it would as you're launching an app (Safari) and loading a web page that might have some caching going on - should cut some fractions off a spinner.

 

[pl1984]

MacBook Core 2 Duo 1.83, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD, OS X 10.6.8 : 25.28 seconds!! long live the Snow Leoaprd

Interesting as Snow Leopard is what I have running on my test system (admittedly it is a fresh install so maybe slowed down by indexing?)

 

[Dronecatcher]

MacBook Core 2 Duo 1.83, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD, OS X 10.6.8 : 25.28 seconds!! long live the Snow Leoaprd

That's including loading Safari homepage? Impressive

 

[eyoungren]

I have a couple of small videos I took in 2011 with my old WinMo phone. Not anything important, but I can't seem to find out how to post them here except to insert links to some other host (and Dropbox ain't it).

Anyone know how to do that or did MR cut off posting video?

 

[amagichnich]

That's including loading Safari homepage? Impressive

it is, but I have to press cmd n as the autostart doesn't work properly

 

[Dorothy Gale]

Power Mac G4 Cube 450MHz 1 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
39 seconds

Power Mac G5 Dual 2.3 GHz 16GB RAM / Mac OS X 10.5.8
57 seconds

 

[amagichnich]

Ethenet?

Missing an 'r'…

Not only the missing "r" but the wrong cpu speed as well that's why they call it the "silent upgrade" I guess?

 

[TheShortTimer]

From chime to the desktop, including entering my password...

iBook G3 Dual USB 500Mhz - 640MB RAM - Tiger: 1m 2s.

MacBook Pro 1,1 - Core Duo 2.16Ghz - 2GB RAM - Snow Leopard: 36s.

 

[Project Alice]

One thing I’ve noticed with PPC macs is the open firmware takes longer to POST than the newer intel EFI does. This makes it a little unfair comparing intel macs to PPC macs. It’s about 4-5 seconds before we’re even seeing a white screen on a PPC Mac, whereas an intel one has already started loading OS X.