Upgrade to SSD to cope with slow Lion

[braddown]

I have just completed upgrading my 2010 iMac, 2011 Mac Mini and 2011 Macbook Air to Lion, the Air which has an SSD is performing beautifully while the iMac and Mini are both now slow and horrible to use with Lion.

Has anyone had any success using an external SSD as a startup disk via FW800 or USB2 to speed up the performance?

Brad Down

 

[Sandman1969]

I have just completed upgrading my 2010 iMac, 2011 Mac Mini and 2011 Macbook Air to Lion, the Air which has an SSD is performing beautifully while the iMac and Mini are both now slow and horrible to use with Lion.

Has anyone had any success using an external SSD as a startup disk via FW800 or USB2 to speed up the performance?

Brad Down

That configuration is not going to help you... FW800/USB would definitely be a HUGE bottleneck.

I have absolutely no issues on all four of our iMacs running Lion.

 

[leman]

Has anyone had any success using an external SSD as a startup disk via FW800 or USB2 to speed up the performance?

There were some reports of success using the FW800 on the forums (I can't find the thread though). Of course, FW800 does not have enough bandwidth to utilize the sustained transfer speeds of an SSD, but the sustained speeds are overrated IRL as you only need them for copying large amounts of data (a task which is not frequently performed by an average user). The low random access times are much more important and in fact, they are are responsible for that nimble SSD's "feel". So an SSD over a FW800 interface will probably feel faster than an internal HHD (although its still a waste of SSD's true potential).

Anyway, I would suggest you to try completely reinstalling Lion, using an installer image. My iMac is as fast with Lion as it was with SL, if anything, it actually appears somehow faster in some tasks (Lion may be slightly more RAM-hungry though, but given the RAM prices its not a big issue).

 

[Spike88]

If (when ???) I upgrade my 2010 iMac to Lion, I will ensure my iMac has a minimum 8 GBs ram. I heard Lion runs much better with more then 4 GBs of ram. If your "slow" Macs are at 4 GBs of ram, suggest upgrading to minimum 8 GBs of RAM as well.

 

[Sandman1969]

If (when ???) I upgrade my 2010 iMac to Lion, I will ensure my iMac has a minimum 8 GBs ram. I heard Lion runs much better with more then 4 GBs of ram. If your "slow" Macs are at 4 GBs of ram, suggest upgrading to minimum 8 GBs of RAM as well.

Our new ones are 16GB and 8GB and are VERY fast.

The kids' hand me downs which are our old 2007 Core 2 Duo 2.8s with 4GB, run without a problem as well. The wife and I ran Lion on there since it came out and until we got our new 27" iMacs in Dec. No performance problems with them either. Though of course the news are MUCH quicker.

 

[Spike88]

Our new ones are 16GB and 8GB and are VERY fast.

The kids' hand me downs which are our old 2007 Core 2 Duo 2.8s with 4GB, run without a problem as well. The wife and I ran Lion on there since it came out and until we got our new 27" iMacs in Dec. No performance problems with them either. Though of course the news are MUCH quicker.

What the paging ratios on these older iMacs? re: Does Lion "page out" much more than SL? How much more disk activity is now happening? With more paging & disk activity, is your Lion making your older boxes run hotter?

.

 

[Sandman1969]

What the paging ratios on these older iMacs? re: Does Lion "page out" much more than SL? How much more disk activity is now happening? With more paging & disk activity, is your Lion making your older boxes run hotter?

.

Never impacted me to even take a look. They have always ran a little warm, I didn't notice Lion being any warmer.

I can take a look at that later, if I think about it...

 

[matspekkie]

I would suggest you run disk aid once first see if there are some permission problems. Not enough memory might also be a reasonably easy cheap fix.

I have just completed upgrading my 2010 iMac, 2011 Mac Mini and 2011 Macbook Air to Lion, the Air which has an SSD is performing beautifully while the iMac and Mini are both now slow and horrible to use with Lion.

Has anyone had any success using an external SSD as a startup disk via FW800 or USB2 to speed up the performance?

Brad Down

 

[mmomega]

Our new ones are 16GB and 8GB and are VERY fast.

The kids' hand me downs which are our old 2007 Core 2 Duo 2.8s with 4GB, run without a problem as well. The wife and I ran Lion on there since it came out and until we got our new 27" iMacs in Dec. No performance problems with them either. Though of course the news are MUCH quicker.

Same as above for the most part.

None of our older Mac Lions run any different than before. My Son-in-law has a 2010 standard Macbook Pro 15, wife has a 2009 MacBook Pro 15, nephew on a 13 Pro, and my 2010 and 2011 Mac Mini. All with standard RAM from 2GB-4GB. No SSD's. Everything runs fine.
The 2011 Mac Mini is a Plex Server for 3 TV's. the 2010 Mini is a Digital X-Ray and storage server both have not been powered down in months.
Not sure if theres just something wrong with your HDD or a bad install, have you tried a formatted and fresh install?

 

[Spike88]

Sandman1969,

If you do a search of this forum (and others) using the search words of "Lion" and "heat" or "hot", your find several posts of iMac owners posting about SL to Lion upgrade running hotter afterwards. They show heat numbers within SL. And new heat numbers with Lion. A clear night and day comparison. Sometimes, as much as 15 F higher in heat. And being a compressed all-in-one box, this 15 F "more" does shorten its life expectancy difference. Especially in the long run. Just like autos (engines and transmissions), cooler = better = longer life. Besides this heat issue, other folks have noticed that Lion runs much better with more memory as well. For me, I won't be upgrading to Lion until SL is NO longer supported. Upgrading to Lion gives me no features or benefits that I need.

.

 

[Sandman1969]

Sandman1969,

If you do a search of this forum (and others) using the search words of "Lion" and "heat" or "hot", your find several posts of iMac owners posting about SL to Lion upgrade running hotter afterwards. They show heat numbers within SL. And new heat numbers with Lion.

......

.

That's all well and good. However I haven't experienced the heating problems apparently.

I don't have a need to do a search for the problem, since I haven't experienced it. /shrug