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MP 1,1-5,1 OC/Monterey weirdness

L

LookToWindward

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 5, 2015
288
24
Hi,

I installed OC/Monterey to a smaller HDD 160 GB. I originally installed it onto a 2 TB drive (which I still have). Monterey uses APFS which can't be read on El Capitan, so it order to maintain HDD compatibility between my machines I decided to make the Boot disk (APFS) small and not store any data on it. The 2 TB drive can then be formatted HFS+ and used for data and can be easily be swapped between machines and if the OC/OS gets blown away, I will still have the data on the separate drive.

The install went well and I'm booted into Monterey on the HDD160 but it is taking a really long time to load the Finder the disk is thrashing non-stop the whole time! It's always slow on the first boot anyway so I'm waiting for the thrashing to stop and then reset and see if it's useable and the thrashing stops,

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to use an old disk drive for this?

Comments welcome!

All the Best
Dave
 
I've found the reason for the slow down and disk thrashing! This machine has 10 GB installed, 2x4 GB and 2x1 GB, the 4 GB modules are not being seen by the OS? It still boots but slowly......
 
I pulled out the RAM boards gave them a clean, put them back in and rebooted EL Cap and I have my 10 GB back!
 
I booted up OC/Monterey and it was still a lot slower than with the 2 TB but still usable, however after I had installed most of the Apps I use the free space on the 160 GB dropped to about 90 GB, which isn't enough.

I have a 250 GB and a 320 GB, I will see how they perform, but 160 is too little for Monterey. I'm not sure if the drive is physically slower or not.
 
Anything later than 2013's mavericks will run super slow on non SSD volume. APFS also murders HDD performance. As you saw, the 160 drive is also slower since 1.) it probably spins slower and 2.) the density is much lower compared to your 2TB so less data passes under the heads per revolution.

You should really consider using a SSD for the boot volume.
 
saudor said:
Anything later than 2013's mavericks will run super slow on non SSD volume. APFS also murders HDD performance. As you saw, the 160 drive is also slower since 1.) it probably spins slower and 2.) the density is much lower compared to your 2TB so less data passes under the heads per revolution.

You should really consider using a SSD for the boot volume.
Click to expand...
It's the same RPM 7600.

Yes, my plan is to move everything onto a SSD, this exercise was mainly to find out how big an SSD I would need. iI think ~250 GB should be enough for all my apps etc.

It was usable with the 160, but it didn't leave much wriggle space.....
 
LookToWindward said:
It's the same RPM 7600.

Yes, my plan is to move everything onto a SSD, this exercise was mainly to find out how big an SSD I would need. iI think ~250 GB should be enough for all my apps etc.

It was usable with the 160, but it didn't leave much wriggle space.....
Click to expand...
Depending on where you live, you can get a really high quality 500gb for a good price. A few months ago, a top tier 2TB SSD was $99

Otherwise, 250gb is enough. I have the Adobe CC suite installed and my startup volume is using 70gb
 
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