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SSD versus HDD and overheating

W

WorkerBee2015

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 23, 2015
41
4
Hi:

I have a customer that has a 2010 MacBook Pro that was sluggish and slow. I ran Scannerz on it and the hard drive is bad. I/O tests on the cable came back clean, and there were no weird readings like system faults, so the logic board is OK too. Everything indicates it's limited to the hard drive and it isn't severe, but considering it's age I'm recommending replacing it.

This guy is using El Capitan and before testing I noticed the fans were coming on a lot, particularly when web processes were present. Although the drive was bad, it wasn't so damaged to be useless. I suspect the HDDs slowness and the fact that they run a hotter than an SSD may be contributing to the heating problem.

Can anyone out there confirm that the system will run cooler, or at least cool enough with an SSD for his fans to stop coming on so often? I'm not really sure the fans coming on so often is because El Capitan is loading the CPU so much or because of heat generated from the hard drive.
 
HDD versus SSD will have nearly no affect. HDD's get hotter by maybe fractions of a degree than an SSD will.

If a machine is running hot, there may be an issue with the motherboard, unlike you believe. This has been my experience in the past.
 
The 2010 models used a Core 2 Duo, not a later generation processor. If it's web processes it's likely Safari, and it doesn't run efficiently with El Capitan, so yes, the fans will come on. I see this all the time on 2009 era MacBooks and the 2010 Macbook Pro isn't really that much better CPU wise.

That said, some web sites have become downright abusive when loading ads. I actually saw once site eat up 4 GB of RAM on what I consider crap. It got to the point that the system started swapping and paging. Once Safari was closed the problem cleared immediately.You can easily check that out with Performance Probe that's in the Scannerz package. Just watch the main display panel. If memory is all Red and Blue and you start seeing paging etc, that will show it. Once Safari is closed everything will clear.
 
MacRobert10 said:
The 2010 models used a Core 2 Duo, not a later generation processor. If it's web processes it's likely Safari, and it doesn't run efficiently with El Capitan, so yes, the fans will come on. I see this all the time on 2009 era MacBooks and the 2010 Macbook Pro isn't really that much better CPU wise.

That said, some web sites have become downright abusive when loading ads. I actually saw once site eat up 4 GB of RAM on what I consider crap. It got to the point that the system started swapping and paging. Once Safari was closed the problem cleared immediately.You can easily check that out with Performance Probe that's in the Scannerz package. Just watch the main display panel. If memory is all Red and Blue and you start seeing paging etc, that will show it. Once Safari is closed everything will clear.
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Samuelsan2001 said:
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Good idea!

To the OP: If the hard drive itself is mechanically failing it may start overheating too. I had a WD in an external enclosure and it got so hot you couldn't touch it right before it failed.
 
I split the users partition into two, put Snow Leopard on the new partition, and had him test it like that. The problems don't exist with Snow Leopard, they exist with El Capitan. I noticed when it occurs there's abnormal activity from mds_stores and UserEventAgent, primarily the latter. At one point the CPU was pegged almost all the time under El Capitan.

This was done as an experiment. At least I know the hardware is good.
 
WorkerBee2015 said:
I split the users partition into two, put Snow Leopard on the new partition, and had him test it like that. The problems don't exist with Snow Leopard, they exist with El Capitan. I noticed when it occurs there's abnormal activity from mds_stores and UserEventAgent, primarily the latter. At one point the CPU was pegged almost all the time under El Capitan.

This was done as an experiment. At least I know the hardware is good.
Click to expand...

I've seen that problem mentioned numerous times before. Try upgrading El Capitan to 10.11.1 and see if it improves or goes away. I can't guarantee anything. El Capitan will probably be fixed right before the release of 10.12, which I assume will be in about 12 months (sarcasm alert!).
 
MacRobert10 said:
I've seen that problem mentioned numerous times before. Try upgrading El Capitan to 10.11.1 and see if it improves or goes away. I can't guarantee anything. El Capitan will probably be fixed right before the release of 10.12, which I assume will be in about 12 months (sarcasm alert!).
Click to expand...

10.11.1 helped, but when I put the 10.11.2 beta on it, it seemed even better. On .0 and .1 there were tons of page outs and swaps occurring when essentially doing nothing. I just hope the beta can be trusted, but I do have backups.
 
WorkerBee2015 said:
10.11.1 helped, but when I put the 10.11.2 beta on it, it seemed even better. On .0 and .1 there were tons of page outs and swaps occurring when essentially doing nothing. I just hope the beta can be trusted, but I do have backups.
Click to expand...
They seemed to have some memory consumption problems with 10.11.1 and 10.11.0. They're much improved with the 10.11.2 beta. Let's just hope they keep going down the right track.
 
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