Mac Pro OCW SSD vs HD - OCW SSD Boot Slower?

[dyn]

So it seems that MP is unable to have the same boot time as MBP? In MBP the startup bong and the spinning wheel appears almost immediately once you press the power button, while in MP it takes 10 seconds before the startup bong appears. So I guess the delay between the bongs is what cause the MP to boots longer.

Some Macs have a slight delay between pressing the power button and the startup bong. My mbp (mid 2010) has that exact same problem, my other Macs don't. It seems to be something related to the optical drive, pram/smc and/or efi. For some resetting the pram/smc does nothing, for others it does magic and for some it only makes the problem less worse. It seems to be some bug that only affects booting, everything else works as it should.

You mp has both a ssd and a hdd. The hdd needs to spin up, etc. which is still the same whether the ssd or the hdd is the boot drive. You might see a difference when only using the ssd. Again, it's what transporteur already told you: it's about the entire machine, not just the ssd!

However, boot time is not very interesting, it says absolutely nothing about the performance of the ssd and the machine. My mbp might be one of the slowest Macs when booting but it most definitely is one of the fastest machines I have (the other one is a 2010 mp with a ssd and a hdd). Both the mbp and mp are screamingly fast, the other Macs are dead slow (when compared).

 

[DeeEss]

strangely enough...I all of a sudden had a 1 minute boot time and hang on the blue screen. It turns out it was my external drives. I ejected and unplugged them and the problem went a way.

 

[LangleyMemphis]

I had recently installed a 115GB OWC Mercury Extreme in one of the optical bays of my Mac Pro 1.1. The boot time (using Snow Leopard) was very quick.

I was also upgrading some hard drives, moving them around into different bay positions, installed a bluetooth trackpad, and moved user and data files off of the SSD over to a HD.

At some point during all of this, my boot time suddenly and unexplainably became painfully long, with a long wait for the startup bong, a long grey screen before the cog shows up, then spinning cog on grey screen for a bit, then blue screen for at least 10-15 seconds, before the login screen would finally show. It felt like forever. Once logged in though, things were speedy as expected. (I did notice though at times my trackpad pointer would stutter and would be very difficult to place on screen.)

To attempt a fix of the startup issue, I made sure that the startup disk was set to the SSD volume with the OS, and tried resetting the PRAM and SMC, but none of that worked.

During these attempts to fix, I realized that I had had some HD's mounted in two Rosewill external esata enclosures, connected to the MP via a Sonnet E2P PCIe esata card. I remembered that the MP seemed to boot quickly when the drives were in the enclosures, but now there were no drives in them, and perhaps that had something to do with the slow boot time. The enclosures were now empty, but still powered on.

So I did the following, all at once, and in no particular order:

-I had two HD's in the MP, one in bay 2, the other in bay 4 (1 and 3 were empty). I moved them to bay 1 and 2.
-While I had the MP open, I disconnected then reconnected both the power and sata connections to the SSD.
-I turned off Bluetooth.
-Deleted the old user home folders from the OS volume (SSD), since they were now one of the HD's.
-I powered off the Rosewill external enclosures.

Restarted the machine, reset the PRAM again, and poof, the MP starts up again VERY fast from the SSD.

I listed all of the above b/c I'm not sure what exactly did the trick, so I wanted to be complete in my description of what may/may not have worked. I'm pretty sure though that it was powering down the esata enclosures that fixed it, just as DeeEss mentioned in the prior post.

Going to turn Bluetooth back on, and see if that has any effect going forward.