Very slow pre-unibody MacBook

[anything85]

Hi,

I've got a pre-unibody (2010) MacBook which is really (REALLY) slow. You can click on a folder and then literally make a cup of tea before it opens

If you try to access anything on the hard disk it is unresponsive, but you don't see a spinning wheel that often.

I had similar slowness issues with spinning wheels on another MacBook which was a 2012 unibody and replaced the SATA cable which fixed the issue.

I'm wondering if it's the same problem here, because I've removed the drive from the 2010 MacBook today and it's working perfectly plugged into another laptop, so the disk itself isn't faulty.

I've opened up the laptop but the SATA cable in the 2010 pre-unibody is buried a bit deeper than in the unibody.
Does anyone know of a good guide on replacing this, as my Google searches haven't returned anything useful yet.

Any other tips/advice or diagnosis I can do on the 2010 slow MacBook would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Al

 

[Anonymous Freak]

What happens when you boot from an external drive? It could just be the drive itself... One bonus - the pre-unibody models are really easy to swap the hard drive, so it's trivially easy to test if you have a replacement drive.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

There's a huge difference between having an OS booted from the disk, and running from it, compared to just having it set up as an external drive to another machine.

But you can add an SSD to make the machine MUCH faster, even though it is so old.

 

[EugW]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought all 2010 MacBooks are unibody. What is the exact model number of the MacBook?

Regardless, have you tried a different drive in the MacBook? Or have you tried putting the drive in an external enclosure and booting off it?