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Oder

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 22, 2018
33
5
Hi Guys,

I have a Macbook Pro (13" / mid 2012 / model a1278 / High Sierra 10.13.6) upgraded it with ssd some years ago but few weeks ago mac crashed and had to replace the hdd cable and ssd drive as it was corrupted. After this used Migration Tool to have all the files back on the new drive but laptop is very slow even typing on safari or small tasks the beach ball of death comes on so i thought needed more Ram so added today 8gb of new ram (had 4gb before) started computer and same! No improovments and not faster also BBOD, just opening a tab in Safari takes more then 6 seconds, typing makes it sluggish or a simple task makes the computer very slow, what could be?

Before the laptop crashed noticed that when upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra the laptop was bit slower but not showing BBOD for any simple task, i know there is something wrong but can't figure it out.

Maybe the new hdd cable is slower? maybe the APFS formatting i wasn't using before makes it perform slower?

The ssd i was using was Sandisk and now a Kingston ssd but don't think this is the problem as also changed the brands on cMP 5.1 and performs great.

Already tried PRAM reset, turned off FireVault run CC Cleaner, Onyx all the same, please help!
 
Last edited:
Definitely check what's going on in Activity Monitor if you haven't already. If nothing else works I would try a clean reinstall of the OS.
 
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Thank you the SATA cable was just replaced 2 weeks ago, is there any way to test the cable?
Also been looking to Activity Monitor for couple hours and computer performs just a little bit better with added 8gb (10gb in total now) but still BBOD and sluggish typing. I also must say that have Bootcamp/Win7 on the same drive partitioned w/ 250gb for each OS would this affect system performance?
 
BrianBaughn has a good idea above.

Go to the users & groups preference pane, and create a NEW, "temporary" user account with administrative privileges.

Then power down, reboot, log into the temp account, and try Safari again.

Do things change?

If the computer suddenly becomes "more responsive" in the temp account, then it would look like something in your "regular" account is mucking things up. You've got to find out what it is.

When you're done with the temp account, just delete it.
 
Using the Migration Assistant likely brought back your system files and preferences from the previous install. If MA brought back corrupted files that could be your issue.

The New User will help point to whether something is corrupted in your user account's Library.

If the Issue still remains, try a clean install of the OS and DO NOT migrate anything. Try some basic tests to see how things are behaving. If the machine plays nice, then you need to do fresh installs of all of your software to be sure that you aren't pulling back in corrupted files.

Also, how are things behaving in the Windoze partition? Are things sluggish on that side as well?
 
Thank you all for the help! Im almost sure its something related to APFS format as it was the only thing changed, found some users saying APFS performs better on recent machines and this one is a mid 2012 so this might be the problem.

Did you test the performance in a new User Account?
I will try this out tonight.

Did you try a clean reinstall? Apple hardware test?
I did a clean install with new ssd then used migration tool to import user data and apps.

BrianBaughn has a good idea above.

Go to the users & groups preference pane, and create a NEW, "temporary" user account with administrative privileges.

Then power down, reboot, log into the temp account, and try Safari again.

Do things change?

If the computer suddenly becomes "more responsive" in the temp account, then it would look like something in your "regular" account is mucking things up. You've got to find out what it is.

When you're done with the temp account, just delete it.
I will try this tonight. But i just quickly tested and noticed the Safari Ram usage was a lot lower.

Using the Migration Assistant likely brought back your system files and preferences from the previous install. If MA brought back corrupted files that could be your issue.

The New User will help point to whether something is corrupted in your user account's Library.

If the Issue still remains, try a clean install of the OS and DO NOT migrate anything. Try some basic tests to see how things are behaving. If the machine plays nice, then you need to do fresh installs of all of your software to be sure that you aren't pulling back in corrupted files.

Also, how are things behaving in the Windoze partition? Are things sluggish on that side as well?
The Win side performs better then OSX! Think i will format this partition and downgrade to Sierra without APFS format that slows down my machine straight away.

Have TRIM disabled does this make the computer faster/slower? Searched online but opinions are like 50/50..

Also this ssd speeds are normal?
 

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How is the health of your battery? A battery that needs replacing will cause the CPU to throttle.
Sorry just saw your comment, sometimes battery says it needs to be replaced but at the moment not saying nothing.
 
I have a mid 2012 MacBook Pro with 8 gigs RAM. I upgraded to a Crucial SSD a few months ago. Running the latest version of Mojave (10.14.3). There was a night and day difference in speed. It's like a brand new computer now. Super fast compared to before. I really couldn't believe how much faster the SSD has made it run. I don't have a partition because I don't run Bootcamp or Windows. Not sure why you're having issues. Best of luck.
 
That SSD write speed is way too low. That's slower than a spinner. Either your SSD is bad (not likely), or the SATA cable is bad (very likely). I'd RMA that SATA cable. The symptoms you describe sound like a bad SATA cable (I've seen this before).

If it's slow after replacing the cable again, then I'd try a clean reinstall of macOS. Also, replace that battery if it is saying "Service Now"
 
That SSD write speed is way too low. That's slower than a spinner. Either your SSD is bad (not likely), or the SATA cable is bad (very likely). I'd RMA that SATA cable. The symptoms you describe sound like a bad SATA cable (I've seen this before).

If it's slow after replacing the cable again, then I'd try a clean reinstall of macOS. Also, replace that battery if it is saying "Service Now"
This is what i have been thinking, the Sata cable might be the problem, already contacted the store lets see what they answer back. Also enabled TRIM as saw many mixed opinions but for this laptop boot takes like 2 min so deactivated it.
 
How much free space does the SSD have? Is there anything running in the background (FileVault encrypting or if you turned it off decrypting, etc).

Boot into recovery mode (command-r while turning on Mac). Select English if you have to, open disk utility click on the Macintosh HD volume (or whatever you've called it) and click first aid. If first aid is greyed out you'll need to mount the volume by clicking mount, selecting the admin name (it might not be the default) and enter your password, then click first aid. Click show details as it runs.

This will run fsck_apfs where the drive can be unmounted to check and repair errors.

Close disk utility with the volume still mounted and click utilities > terminal from the menu bar at the top and type:

cd /Volumes/(volume name). Example, if its Macintosh HD "cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD"

Then type:

time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024

That is a timed write dd command that is making a file (tstfile) from an unlimited source (dev/zero) mostly outside the influence of the MacOS and user data. The results will look like this....

Screen Shot 2019-03-04 at 5.13.59 PM.png


499914264 bytes/sec = 499 megabytes/sec (btw that is my aftermarket SATA3 SSD installed using APFS with FileVault turned on and is roundabout what your SSD write speed should be).

Keep in mind this does leave a 1 gb output file (tstfile) in Macintosh HD that you'll want to eventually delete from Finder in MacOS or in terminal while you are still there by typing "rm tstfile".

If the SSD speed is still slow there I would likely pull it and test it in another machine just to absolutely verify its the cable or logic board and not the SSD.

Good luck.
 
It took more then a year to find this problem 😂 (now I can laugh!) so wanted to leave here in case anyone has the same issue. The problem was installing a new Kingston SSD that needed a firmware upgrade and this could only be done with Windows program "Kingston SSD Manager".
 
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