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I'm in shock, a little skeptical, but relieved!
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Clearing the History in Safari may help with performance.
Given what you've reported with your MBP, I think it would help if you did the following:
1) Go to the App Store and download "Blackmagic Disk Speed Test" and run it. The app is free. When you run it, a dial will go up and down. Wait until that stops and report the figures that it comes up with. This will give us an idea if your HDD is slow or not (an abnormally slow HDD may indicate it's failing). The HDD that came in my 2012 Mini reaches about 70MB/sec., the HDD from my 2014 Mini is about 90MB/sec., the HDD that came with my 2012 MBP (HDD was manufactured in June 2014, I bought the MBP last December) is about 95MB/sec. A faster 7200rpm 2-1/2" drive that I bought last year gets close to 110MB/sec.
2) First, go into Safari and open the web pages and browse as you would normally do. Then, in Finder, in the Applications folder, there's a Utilities folder. Go to it and open the "Activity Monitor" application. Click on the "Memory" tab at the top. At the very bottom are different figures. Report what you get for the following: Physical Memory, Memory Used and Swap Used.
There may be something with your hardware that can help with performance that would be relatively easy (but would cost money) to change. Doing these steps will help determine that.
Given what you've reported with your MBP, I think it would help if you did the following:
1) Go to the App Store and download "Blackmagic Disk Speed Test" and run it. The app is free. When you run it, a dial will go up and down. Wait until that stops and report the figures that it comes up with. This will give us an idea if your HDD is slow or not (an abnormally slow HDD may indicate it's failing). The HDD that came in my 2012 Mini reaches about 70MB/sec., the HDD from my 2014 Mini is about 90MB/sec., the HDD that came with my 2012 MBP (HDD was manufactured in June 2014, I bought the MBP last December) is about 95MB/sec. A faster 7200rpm 2-1/2" drive that I bought last year gets close to 110MB/sec.
2) First, go into Safari and open the web pages and browse as you would normally do. Then, in Finder, in the Applications folder, there's a Utilities folder. Go to it and open the "Activity Monitor" application. Click on the "Memory" tab at the top. At the very bottom are different figures. Report what you get for the following: Physical Memory, Memory Used and Swap Used.
There may be something with your hardware that can help with performance that would be relatively easy (but would cost money) to change. Doing these steps will help determine that.
I just spent quite a long time doing a deep system scan with avast. It did come back with a few bad files. I took care of them and Avast took care of them. I'll run that app again tomorrow to be sure I got it taken care of so I don't accidentally include the bad files that were taken off when I use Time Machine and my external hard drive.
Honestly I'm not convinced there's anything wrong with it. If you don't run it for a very long time, it gets super busy for a while sorting itself out.
I'd let it run overnight (after disabling sleep) and see if that helps.
Realistically, an SSD would make it feel better than new.
I'd let it run overnight (after disabling sleep) and see if that helps.
Realistically, an SSD would make it feel better than new.
Those results don't look good. My 2011 Mac Mini (5400 rpm drive) was between 30mb/s and 60mb/s back in October before I changed it for an SSD. Yours in a 2012 device are only 20mb/s.
When I put the SSD in, I got between 450mb/s and 500mb/s. Here's a test I just did. SSD really makes a difference... I had planned to replace the computer, but now know I'll get several more years out of it.
When I put the SSD in, I got between 450mb/s and 500mb/s. Here's a test I just did. SSD really makes a difference... I had planned to replace the computer, but now know I'll get several more years out of it.
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What do you mean "helps"? It is running just as good as new if not better.
Just get an SSD. Thank us later.
// thread
That's bog slow, even for a normal hard drive. It's either full to the brim or about to crap out. A normal, healthy, not-overly-full platter hard drive like what you have in your machine should be at the very least 4 times as fast as those numbers.
Whoa! That's one slow drive!
As the others said, get a new SSD and you'll wonder why you didn't do it earlier.
As a comparison, my MBP takes 12 seconds to boot up from the chime. Your HD probably takes much longer.
As others have mentioned and comparing it to the different drives that have come with my Macs (post #27), your drive is abnormally slow and as mentioned earlier, could be a symptom of a failing drive. A new 7200rpm HDD will be about 4.5-5X faster than what you have, a SSD would be about 5X faster than a normal HDD. Let us know what the memory statistics are. It sounds like you would like to have someone else do any possible work opening up your computer. It would save money if you could do both drive and memory at the same time if you need more memory. Memory is not that expensive and could explain the sluggish response with Safari.
An SSD can be put in the same slot that the HDD uses. Instead of a spinning platter(s), it has computer chips that store data. Also, unlike standard memory chips, the data is retained after power is switched off. As mentioned earlier, in the 2012 non-Retina MBP, a SSD would be about 5X the speed of a HDD. Boot-up times are noticeably faster and programs that require disk access when it starts are faster. If the user has to wait for data from the HDD or SDD, that will be faster. However, it doesn't make everything your computer does go faster nor will a user necessarily notice the difference in all cases. A major-brand 1TB HDD is about $60-$80, an SSD of a slightly smaller size would be about $220-320. You really need least a new HDD. After that, if you're being hampered because you don't have enough memory, that would be the next priority and likely to be more noticeable for a cheaper price than a SSD. After that, there isn't much more you can do to enhance performance (hardware-wise) than a SSD.
For all intents and purposes, a hard drive and a SSD are one and the same as far as function go. Both are used in a computer to store data.
The difference between the two is the technology used to store that data. A hard drive uses magnetic platters and a reading head, in the same way a CD uses a plastic disk and a laser, to store data. That tech is decades old and is pretty much at the peak of how fast we can make it go. We can't make the platters spin any faster or they'll vibrate and wreak havoc, and we can't make the reading head move any faster either. So about (I'm just trying to make the numbers look pretty here) 100 MB/s in read and write speed is pretty much the max you can expect. The 20/20 we're seeing in your test indicate either a hard drive that is way too full, or one that is dying. Keep a good backup handy, it's likely the latter, if you don't and it crashes, you've lost everything, for good.
The SSD does the same thing, but in a difference manner. The closest every item would be the memory in a USB thumb drive or say, in your iPod or iPhone. Data is stored in computer chips instead of on a disk. Since there are no moving parts, you aren't limited by them. In your particular computer, a SSD can reach speeds of about 500 MB/s in read and write.
So in short, a healthy hard drive's about 5X faster than what you've got now, and a SSD is about 5X faster than that.
So basically, if you stick a SSD in there, booting up, opening apps and files and similar operations should feel roughly 25 times as fast as what they do now.
SSDs help when opening apps or moving larges gobs of data, so if you do anything that makes your computer "think" (editing photos, videos, encoding stuff) the SSD will be of no help. It only helps when access to your data is needed. Opening apps, saving files, opening files, copying files, etc.
To put it simply, it's just like a hard drive. The difference is instead of a spinning magnetic disk, it uses similar technology to that of a flash drive. Imagine a bunch of flash drives working in parallel and stuck into a box the size of a regular hard drive. That's an SSD. It's a lot faster and has no moving parts.
Safari and Firefox are both pretty fast now. Faster than they both have been when I posted my original post to this thread. Some pages will take a few seconds to load, but others take less than a half a second. CleanMyMac3 did find a few issues, but they were taken care of. I'll scan sometime again tomorrow after using my MBP tonight. To see what I can find in the results. I was hoping to post the results here earlier today, but I couldn't.
[doublepost=1463024328][/doublepost]I ran cleanmymac3 earlier today and got 4.71 gigabytes back. It may not be much, but it seems to have made a bit of a difference. Browsing the internet seems to go a bit faster for both safari and firefox. I guess I will run cleanmymac3 daily.
[doublepost=1463024328][/doublepost]I ran cleanmymac3 earlier today and got 4.71 gigabytes back. It may not be much, but it seems to have made a bit of a difference. Browsing the internet seems to go a bit faster for both safari and firefox. I guess I will run cleanmymac3 daily.
I can see how Cleanmymac can help but it's kind of like treating the symptoms of your problem. Your HDD, which may or may not be on it's way to hard drive heaven, is really slow. It's possible that the Blackmagic test results will improve if some files have been removed - that's something you can check out.
I'm not sure I did the black magic test right..... I ran the Black Magic Speed test, and I posted the results earlier. The internet seems fine and loads a bit faster than what it did before my MBP stopped working.
Running the Blackmagic test is pretty straightforward and I'm pretty sure that the results you got earlier are valid. I was suggesting to run it again to see if the numbers are higher after running Cleanmymac.