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Is 1 minute boot time normal?

R

Ryan6816

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 28, 2015
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I'm using a mid 2009 white macbook (it's a pretty old piece of hardware) and I've noticed that the boot time has increased compared to OS X Lion.
From the moment I press the power button, it takes exactly a minute to display the login screen.
I've tried resetting PRAM and SMC, and have repaired disk and disk permissions.
But there was no change in boot time.
Is it supposed to be this slow?


My macbook has 4GB of Ram and a 5400rpm HDD.
Running OS X 10.10.5, Windows 7 installed on bootcamp partition.
 
When in doubt, check to make sure the current startup volume is actually selected as the startup volume in System Preferences/Startup Disk.

There is about a 30 second timeout/lag if a current OS X/Windows Partition isn't selected as the boot drive.
 
Its doing more processing, setting up and importantly a lot more cloud type service setup where there are external dependencies to either respond or timeout.

You are booting off old hardware and the slowest of disk types so I'm not surprised personally. Is it the original HDD?
 
I already tried restarting after checking Macbook HD as startup volume.
 
Ryan6816 said:
Yes it's the original HDD
Click to expand...

So old and small 5400rpm HDD. That is about the slowest use case. Boot in Safe Mode and see if that is noticeably quicker, if so check your login items. Other than that I suspect you have what you will get. An SSD will improve things, or using sleep rather than shutting down (I very rarely shutdown or restart, mainly just as required by updates)
 
no difference in safe mode, and i only have f.lux as a login item.
Guess there's no room for improvement unless I upgrade to an SSD.
 
Well your boot is probably throttled by the HDD speed, probably about 40-50MB/s, you could test with Blackmagic, a bigger capacity 7200rpm disk will lift the read speed to about 80MB/s but that is as far as HDDs will go.

Your machine has max of SATA2 I think so while it will support the data rate of fastest HDD, it won't support current SATA3 SSDs at full speed, the MBP isn't capable of pulling data that fast.
 
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Ryan6816 said:
I'm using a mid 2009 white macbook (it's a pretty old piece of hardware) and I've noticed that the boot time has increased compared to OS X Lion.
From the moment I press the power button, it takes exactly a minute to display the login screen.


My macbook has 4GB of Ram and a 5400rpm HDD.
Running OS X 10.10.5, Windows 7 installed on bootcamp partition.
Click to expand...

Yes its normal for a 5400 Hdd. I have both a desktop 5400 Hdd that takes more than a minute and a SSD drive Notebook that takes a bit over 8 seconds. Normal
 
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For a 5400RPM HDD, 1 min boot time in Yosemite is normal (especially if this is an upgrade from previous OSX, but not clean install).
 
I'm on a 2012 rMBP, so SDD. Yes the boot time has been increasing tremendously since Lion, which was blazing fast. Even upgrading from 10.1 to 10.3, there has been an increase of 30sec blank screen before Apple logo even shows up. I don't think iCloud has anything to do with it, since I was on that since Mavericks, and load time have been increasing incrementally.
 
I had a hand me down '08 vintage MBP that was running Snow Leopard. When I installed Yosemite the boot time slowed appreciably, probably to what you're seeing. I just let it crunch and once up and running performance wasn't that bad.

-jeff
 
My 2008 MacBook with a new 5400rpm drive installed went from off to operational in a bit over a minute. That HDD is a killer.

The difference an SSD makes is amazing.
 
I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 13", with an Intel 530 series SSD in it.

Even though the internal bus is only SATA-2, it boots in 5 seconds, from the first appearance of the Apple to the finder.

I'm using 10.6.8.
 
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