MBA Rev B (late 2008) - back to Snow Leopard

[bened]

Hello,

I upgraded to Lion on my MBA Rev B (late 2008) with SSD and I was very much disappointed. MBA was running very hot, fans were working heavily most of the time, battery was empty after less than an hour.

I reformatted the SSD, reinstalled Snow Leopard from a backup and it runs much smoother.

But it now takes very long before Snow Leopard starts up. There still seems to be parts of Lion on the system, I suspect it has to do with the Lion recovery. Boot up time is very long.

Does anybody has an idea how to get rid of that and bring back the MBA to a pure pre-Lion state?

Best
bened

 

[GGJstudios]

I upgraded to Lion on my MBA Rev B (late 2008) with SSD and I was very much disappointed. MBA was running very hot, fans were working heavily most of the time, battery was empty after less than an hour.

It wasn't Lion causing that. You should have diagnosed the real source of the problem.

I reformatted the SSD, reinstalled Snow Leopard from a backup and it runs much smoother.

But it now takes very long before Snow Leopard starts up. There still seems to be parts of Lion on the system, I suspect it has to do with the Lion recovery.

If you reformatted the drive, there can't be any "parts of Lion" remaining. Again, you need to diagnose the problem, rather than assume it comes from the operating system.

Does anybody has an idea how to get rid of that and bring back the MBA to a pure pre-Lion state?

Start with this: Performance Tips For Mac OS X

 

[bened]

It wasn't Lion causing that. You should have diagnosed the real source of the problem.

If you reformatted the drive, there can't be any "parts of Lion" remaining. Again, you need to diagnose the problem, rather than assume it comes from the operating system.

Start with this: Performance Tips For Mac OS X

Thank for the explanation. Trying now with a clean Lion install.

But even with reformatting the hard drive the Lion install had changed something in the MBA. Starting up under Snow Leopard with option key pressed opened up a menu where you could connect to the internet to download Lion. That was not there before. So Lion install has changed something on my MBA and I don't know how to get rid of that.

Best bened

 

[KPOM]

I had the Rev B with SSD, as well. I think part of the issue you may have is that the SSD back then didn't support the TRIM command to keep the drive running at full speed. The process of installing a brand new OS probably did a lot of writing to the drive.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any easy solution to restore the drive to its original state, since the controller doesn't support TRIM, and garbage collection in late 2008 certainly isn't what it is like now with SSDs.

Digilloyd sells a $40 program called DiskTester that supposedly reconditions SSDs. I nearly bought it 2 years ago, but then bought the 2010 MacBook Air, so I never did get it (since 2010 the MacBook Air drives have supported TRIM). It may be worth a shot. After 3.5 years, there probably is a lot of "garbage" on that SSD.

 

[bened]

I had the Rev B with SSD, as well. I think part of the issue you may have is that the SSD back then didn't support the TRIM command to keep the drive running at full speed. The process of installing a brand new OS probably did a lot of writing to the drive.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any easy solution to restore the drive to its original state, since the controller doesn't support TRIM, and garbage collection in late 2008 certainly isn't what it is like now with SSDs.

Digilloyd sells a $40 program called DiskTester that supposedly reconditions SSDs. I nearly bought it 2 years ago, but then bought the 2010 MacBook Air, so I never did get it (since 2010 the MacBook Air drives have supported TRIM). It may be worth a shot. After 3.5 years, there probably is a lot of "garbage" on that SSD.

Thanks for the suggestion. Tried that already, but interestingly there did not seemed too much garbage. At least the writing speed was not really better afterwards. And it is quite low compared to more modern SSD.

Best,
bened