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Taxer

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 2, 2007
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I installed a new 160 GB Intel 320 SSD in my mid-2010 13" Macbook Pro tonight. The computer boots up slowly, hanging up for what seems like a fairly long time on the initial grey screen before the apple logo appears. After that things happen quickly, as expected. It seems that the overall boot up time is noticeably longer than it was with the HD that came with the computer. This seems odd to me from what I have read about SSDs. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my old HD to the new SSD before I installed it. I'm wondering if I need to reinstall the OSX from the original disk to rectify this issue or if there is another explanation. Any help would be appreciated.
 
I installed a new 160 GB Intel 320 SSD in my mid-2010 13" Macbook Pro tonight. The computer boots up slowly, hanging up for what seems like a fairly long time on the initial grey screen before the apple logo appears. After that things happen quickly, as expected. It seems that the overall boot up time is noticeably longer than it was with the HD that came with the computer. This seems odd to me from what I have read about SSDs. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my old HD to the new SSD before I installed it. I'm wondering if I need to reinstall the OSX from the original disk to rectify this issue or if there is another explanation. Any help would be appreciated.
Not sure if I'm on the right track or not, but did you try repairing disk permissions? How long of a boot time are we talking about?
 
Is your Intel SSD set as your startup disk? In System Preferences, under "Startup Disk", check that your new disk is highlighted. If not, select the disk to highlight it and try a reboot. If no disk is highlighted it can lead to a slow boot. I think there is a delay while OS X looks for a bootable disk if one hasn't been specified in System Preferences.
 
Thanks for the responses. Ian2000's suggestion to check whether the new ssd was highlighted as the startup disk in System Preferences was right on the money! Thanks for that. I had no idea that it is necessary to check this preference when one has changed the hard drive. All the more so here since my laptop has only one drive. Anyway, once I highlighted the ssd as the startup drive, the boot time is much faster. It's not instantaneous but it is much faster than before. Thanks again.
 
I see you got yours working well, but mine still is slow. It takes about 25 seconds from power button to OSX desktop. My old 7200RPM WD Black drive was roughly the same if not faster. Apps even seem to open about the same speed which is say 5-6 seconds for Photoshop. I thought something was wrong with the drive so I put it in my desktop and it boots Windows before the logo finishes and opens windows Photoshop in a blink. Wiped it again, put it back in the macbook and still slow. What am I missing? Bootcamp also lets the windows logo load and sits there for 5+ more seconds before the desktop comes up so it's slow in both bootcamp and OSX for me. The drive I'm using is also an Intel 320 series 160GB being used in a MBP 4.1 (Early 2008 non unibody).
 
The drive I'm using is also an Intel 320 series 160GB being used in a MBP 4.1 (Early 2008 non unibody).

Maybe your machine does not support SATA2. Check in System Profiler to see what speed your SSD is running at (Under Serial ATA section). SATA2 should report 3Gbps.
 
Maybe your machine does not support SATA2. Check in System Profiler to see what speed your SSD is running at (Under Serial ATA section). SATA2 should report 3Gbps.

I feel stupid now lol. It is link speed 1.5 not 3.0. Further investigation shows that the 2009 models had the same issue, but got a firmware update to fix it. The chipset can handle 3gbps, but was capped at 1.5 by Apple apparently. The reason I put the SSD in here was I bought a new VAIO and put the SSD in it (was so damn fast just like my desktop SSD), but didn't like the VAIO. Returned the laptop, but newegg won't take return of the SSD so I thought I'd find it a new home in my MBP. Guess I am just shafted all the way around. This explains the lackluster speeds on boot and general use.
 
Thanks for the responses. Ian2000's suggestion to check whether the new ssd was highlighted as the startup disk in System Preferences was right on the money! Thanks for that. I had no idea that it is necessary to check this preference when one has changed the hard drive. All the more so here since my laptop has only one drive. Anyway, once I highlighted the ssd as the startup drive, the boot time is much faster. It's not instantaneous but it is much faster than before. Thanks again.

If you want to make it even faster: do a clean install.
 
I installed a new 160 GB Intel 320 SSD in my mid-2010 13" Macbook Pro tonight. The computer boots up slowly, hanging up for what seems like a fairly long time on the initial grey screen before the apple logo appears. After that things happen quickly, as expected. It seems that the overall boot up time is noticeably longer than it was with the HD that came with the computer. This seems odd to me from what I have read about SSDs. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my old HD to the new SSD before I installed it. I'm wondering if I need to reinstall the OSX from the original disk to rectify this issue or if there is another explanation. Any help would be appreciated.

Make sure you go to System Prefs and choose the right drive under Startup Disk. It made a difference for me when I installed my SSD.
 
Now you have an excuse to upgrade to a 2011 MBP! :D

I don't want a bulky computer again. I mean the 15" isn't big or anything, but looking to go super thin and light which is why I bought the Sony 13" SB. Unfortunately I think I will be getting an air now which sticks me with a 160GB drive I can't return.


If you want to make it even faster: do a clean install.

This was a clean install. Bare from the SL upgrade discs I bought a while back and then did a fresh boot camp install as well.


Make sure you go to System Prefs and choose the right drive under Startup Disk. It made a difference for me when I installed my SSD.

The slow boot isn't waiting for the apple logo, it's in general not being fast in all stages, which I even said before this post that it was reporting 1.5Gbps. That severely limits my SSD to nearly half of its speed so this has technically been solved. Your solution was also previously mentioned earlier in the thread. If you have a plan on how I can get 3Gbps out of my Early 08 15" MBP, please tell me. The chipset supports it, but was limited by firmware in this model and also various other brands for some random reason.
 
I have found that my permissions on the root (/) directory are incorrectly set by the cloning process and sometimes by Apple updates.

This is what I have in my /etc/rc.local

Code:
#!/bin/sh
# Mount root drive with noatime
mount -vuw -o noatime / 
chown root:admin /

The chown command fixes the permissions. The gray boot screen drops to a few seconds from 10's of seconds.
 
I have found that my permissions on the root (/) directory are incorrectly set by the cloning process and sometimes by Apple updates.

This is what I have in my /etc/rc.local

Code:
#!/bin/sh
# Mount root drive with noatime
mount -vuw -o noatime / 
chown root:admin /

The chown command fixes the permissions. The gray boot screen drops to a few seconds from 10's of seconds.

Hey can you explain this in more depth or can someone else explain how to check this/fix it?
 
Hey can you explain this in more depth or can someone else explain how to check this/fix it?

Open Terminal, and type this:

ls -la / (and then hit ENTER)

The first few lines should be similar to this:
Code:
bills-mbp:~ bill$ ls -la /
total 36588
drwxrwxr-x@  37 root  admin      1326 Jun  1 20:22 .
drwxrwxr-x@  37 root  admin      1326 Jun  1 20:22 ..
-rw-r--r--@   1 bill  staff     15364 May 15 19:40 .DS_Store
drwx------    3 root  staff       102 Apr 14 22:27 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt    2 root  admin        68 Apr 14 23:51 .Trashes

See the one with the single "dot"? That's the root of your drive, /

See how mine is owned by root? If yours says your username, then you have been bit by this.

in terminal, just run

Code:
sudo chown root:admin /

When asked for a password, type in your user's passwd. This will fix the permissions on the root directory, the source of some peoples problems with longer boot times.

The other stuff in there, well, if you can't understand it, I do not want to try and walk you through adding it, you could screw it up and make your system unbootable.
 
I did a standard permissions repair and now my boot is lightning quick. Thanks for the tip!

The terminal command returned the same info as yours so I think I'm good.
 
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