Early 2009 mini with SSD Slow to Boot?

[powerbook911]

Today I put a factory recertified Crucial M4 256GB SSD in my Early 2009 Mac mini that is connected to my main TV. It has served this job for years.

Opening applications is SSD fast. Black Magic shows 200 write and 250+ read, not bad for a 3 Gigabit connection and an older drive.

However, boot time is NOT SSD fast. It takes about 1 minute! I don't understand it.

The late 2009 MBP I put a SSD in years ago booted in about 15 seconds. The 2011 mini server I put a SSD in a few ago boots in about 25 seconds.

Why would a machine take 60 seconds with SSD?

Thanks for any advice, or if this is normal for this generation of machine?

 

[Fishrrman]

You probably have already done this, but...

... have you gone to the Startup Disk preference pane, and specified the newly-installed drive to be the boot drive ??

 

[jbarley]

try booting in "Verbose" mode (cmd+V) to see if or what is making the boot process pause or be slow.

 

[powerbook911]

You probably have already done this, but...

... have you gone to the Startup Disk preference pane, and specified the newly-installed drive to be the boot drive ??

Thank you! This might have done it. Thanks!

Initially yesterday, I checked and it was highlighted. However, I believe what happened is I was distracted and clicked it before I looked at the screen. It must have been unhighlighted previously! Of course, while fighting with it, I kept intending to check this myself, but kept trying other things instead. A bit embarrassing. I did a test now, and it was only 39 seconds until screen sharing reconnected, so that is much better than the 60 seconds when I was actually in the same room as the Mac on its connected display.

My other upgrades had selected the correct drive automatically.

Thanks for BOTH of the responses as I also checked that yesterday.

This was my least exciting SSD upgrade, I suppose because I use the machine so rarely. However, the faster boot is something I wanted. Just in case it ever gets switched off, starting up on a SSD is much better than that old, particularly slow, hard drive especially when you're at the TV wanting to watch or see something on the Mac.


Extra Update -

Timed it at the TV. Approx. 34 seconds for a full restart, about 8 of those seconds was completely shutting down, so probably only about 25 seconds from a cold boot. This is what I expected. Great result.

Thank you!!!