I knew they were agressive when it comes to power management but not that it could affect the entire system. Perhaps I should just set up an external backup solution for a little while (with other drives), physically disconnect both WD green drives and see what happens.
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The cause of my slow MP 5.1?
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I knew they were agressive when it comes to power management but not that it could affect the entire system. Perhaps I should just set up an external backup solution for a little while (with other drives), physically disconnect both WD green drives and see what happens.
why not just get a bigger SSD?
i have a bunch of video apps, LR, CS6, web apps etc + 70GB free on my SSD and thats only a 250GB one.
you can get some 250GB SSD fairly cheep now too
i suspect when you say, right click it spins up your two backup drives as well as your OS drive as it sees 3 copes of all your apps (at least) which is giving you pain.
if i did not have 70GB+ of apps + a lot of large support files (sound loops etc) id be able to fit on to just a 120GB SSD at a push., just keep all non app files off the OS drive and on a HD.
i have a bunch of video apps, LR, CS6, web apps etc + 70GB free on my SSD and thats only a 250GB one.
you can get some 250GB SSD fairly cheep now too
i suspect when you say, right click it spins up your two backup drives as well as your OS drive as it sees 3 copes of all your apps (at least) which is giving you pain.
if i did not have 70GB+ of apps + a lot of large support files (sound loops etc) id be able to fit on to just a 120GB SSD at a push., just keep all non app files off the OS drive and on a HD.
My Seagate drive is a 3TB, plus two Samsung 128GB SSDs; replacing all that with a single SSD would be pretty expensive.
So today I physically opened up my 2010 Mac Pro, did some serious cleaning (lots of dust!). In addition I made the following changes which I hope might make some performance changes (or not):
1) disconnected my "Lightroom cache/Lightroom libraries" SSD from the SATA PCIe card.
Then put it in one of the drive bays instead (via a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter). Now it no longer shows up as a removable orange drive icon on the desktop.
2) physically removed both 3TB Western Digital Green drives from the computer
I'll see if there's any change in the next few days.
One thing that puzzled me are the permissions ("Get info" on said drive, in the Finder) of the two SSDs and the fact that Blackmagic disk speed test tells me the drives are read-only.
The OSX/apps SSD has these permissions:
system: read & write
wheel: read only
everyone: read only
And the Lightroom cache/libraries SSD:
system: read & write
wheel: read & write
everyone: read only
This seems odd to me.
When I use the computer I log in as a standard user, not as an admin, so every time I install something new etc. I'm asked for the admin username and password. My user-area is on the Seagate hard drive, and I suppose there may not be any need to write to the OSX/apps SSD because I also have my own "Library" folder with all my apps' settings.
But for the Lightroom cache/libraries SSD I don't quite understand it as I run Lightroom and I should be able to read/write to it as far as I know, or is there a misunderstanding?
For the time being I changed both SSD's "everyone" to read & write.
Blackmagic disk speed test now reports approx 240 MB/s write and 260 MB/s read speeds with either SSD and around 130 MB/s write and 150MB/s read speeds for the Seagate hard drive (it varies +/- 10 to 30MB/s throughout the test). Do these numbers make sense?
So today I physically opened up my 2010 Mac Pro, did some serious cleaning (lots of dust!). In addition I made the following changes which I hope might make some performance changes (or not):
1) disconnected my "Lightroom cache/Lightroom libraries" SSD from the SATA PCIe card.
Then put it in one of the drive bays instead (via a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter). Now it no longer shows up as a removable orange drive icon on the desktop.
2) physically removed both 3TB Western Digital Green drives from the computer
I'll see if there's any change in the next few days.
One thing that puzzled me are the permissions ("Get info" on said drive, in the Finder) of the two SSDs and the fact that Blackmagic disk speed test tells me the drives are read-only.
The OSX/apps SSD has these permissions:
system: read & write
wheel: read only
everyone: read only
And the Lightroom cache/libraries SSD:
system: read & write
wheel: read & write
everyone: read only
This seems odd to me.
When I use the computer I log in as a standard user, not as an admin, so every time I install something new etc. I'm asked for the admin username and password. My user-area is on the Seagate hard drive, and I suppose there may not be any need to write to the OSX/apps SSD because I also have my own "Library" folder with all my apps' settings.
But for the Lightroom cache/libraries SSD I don't quite understand it as I run Lightroom and I should be able to read/write to it as far as I know, or is there a misunderstanding?
For the time being I changed both SSD's "everyone" to read & write.
Blackmagic disk speed test now reports approx 240 MB/s write and 260 MB/s read speeds with either SSD and around 130 MB/s write and 150MB/s read speeds for the Seagate hard drive (it varies +/- 10 to 30MB/s throughout the test). Do these numbers make sense?
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I'm hoping for replies to the above, but in the meantime I've been running it a couple of days without the (slow WD "green") backup drives to see if that affected anything.
It doesn't seem to have made a difference, but I believe I might have pinpointed the reoccuring spinning beachballs to Firefox. I do have the latest version, which I've read should be very effective, so that puzzles me.
Recently all my open tabs were gone (they should be on my backup drives though, if I can only figure out how to get them back) which means I've been running it with just a single window and a few (perhaps 10) tabs open at once, but alas, still the spinning beachball.
If someone could please fill me in on how to determine the usage/load of each tab as I understood someone earlier in the thread did it could help me determine if certain sites cause more problems than others.
I need to look closer into this -probably refrain from using Firefox for a while and see if I get better performance with Safari.
It doesn't seem to have made a difference, but I believe I might have pinpointed the reoccuring spinning beachballs to Firefox. I do have the latest version, which I've read should be very effective, so that puzzles me.
Recently all my open tabs were gone (they should be on my backup drives though, if I can only figure out how to get them back) which means I've been running it with just a single window and a few (perhaps 10) tabs open at once, but alas, still the spinning beachball.
If someone could please fill me in on how to determine the usage/load of each tab as I understood someone earlier in the thread did it could help me determine if certain sites cause more problems than others.
I need to look closer into this -probably refrain from using Firefox for a while and see if I get better performance with Safari.
Activity monitor can check Firefox usage. However, not sure if it can check usage per tab (for Safari, activity monitor can check per tab usage).
The current version Firefox is very fast indeed. I can keep 20+ tabs opened without any issue. But my 1080Ti has 11GB VRAM, that helps a lot. (Browsers not only use RAM, but also VRAM to accelerate).
Also, if you have any plugins installed, you may disable them one by one to check if make any difference.
if it relay is just Firefox then it's likely to be an add-on you have installed (you installed or accidentally installed or some kind of mailware thing like yahoo search bars etc)
or anti virus or some other app interfering with Firefox
you can also reset Firefox to defaults
you can try disabling all add-ons then turning them back on until you hit the slowdown.
still suspect a clean install and reinstall of all apps with a single OS drive with all apps on a single SSD will make life easy.
im not shore if there will be any odd damage potentially done by your setup, unless your super good with IT some times simple saves work and time.
or anti virus or some other app interfering with Firefox
you can also reset Firefox to defaults
you can try disabling all add-ons then turning them back on until you hit the slowdown.
still suspect a clean install and reinstall of all apps with a single OS drive with all apps on a single SSD will make life easy.
im not shore if there will be any odd damage potentially done by your setup, unless your super good with IT some times simple saves work and time.