Stupid Mac question!

[audi321]

I have a 2015 macbook pro which is spec'd up to the max from new and it hasn't been used that much and still runs like the day it came out of the box.

Armed with this knowledge, I thought I'd buy a 27" 5k iMac from the same period (only £300), only with much better specs (4ghz 4 core chip, 32gb ram etc etc) and although I've factory restored it, its nowhere near as nippy as my MBP.

The only difference really is that I know the iMac has been used almost daily for quite intensive photo/video editing vs the MBP which hasn't had hardly any heavy usage.

So the stupid question incoming.......do chips wear out? Does RAM wear out? The only tangible negative difference is the MBP has a 1tb SSD whereas the iMac has 2tb Fusion drive (I think this puts the OS on an SSD and the rest is HDD), but surely that can't make the slowness of the iMac vs the extra power it has?

Thanks for any comments.....or advice to speed up the iMac.

Edited by audi321 on Wednesday 29th March 10:10

[Captain_Morgan]

Depends on your specific workflow but it could be:

Dust buildup in iMac causing thermal throttling
Spec differences in cpu
Fusion Drive being slower than ssd.

[-Cappo-]

Chips don't wear out.

Years ago I replaced a HDD in a MBP with an SSD and the difference was night & day, so I suspect that's your issue.

[wyson]

Fusion drive vs SSD is the answer.

SSD is a lot faster. Like magnitudes faster.

[wyson]

-Cappo- said:

Chips don't wear out.

Years ago I replaced a HDD in a MBP with an SSD and the difference was night & day, so I suspect that's your issue.

Chips do wear out! They can get damaged as well, its why NASA use 55nm chips for satellites and space probes because they are a lot more durable.

Generally, the electronics are designed to last 10 years trouble free. Then capacitors, resistors might not perform to spec, making the system less stable etc. even if the system hasn’t outright failed.

Buying a 7 year computer is not unlike buying a 7 year old car.

I’d definitely avoid 3 year old graphics cards run at full whack 24/7 in a crypto mining rig, in the same way I’d avoid a 3 year old ex police vehicle with 170k miles on the clock.

Edited by wyson on Wednesday 29th March 11:05

[audi321]

wyson said:

Fusion drive vs SSD is the answer.

SSD is a lot faster. Like magnitudes faster.

What a shame, looks like the iMac Fusion drive isn't swappable for an SSD (without a LOT of hassle). Oh well.......first world problems, looks like I'll have to put up with it then........

[untakenname]

Did the same for a relative with an identical Mac as it was taking over five minutes from the machine being powered on to being able to use it (with reopen windows when logging back in enabled), after the swap it was less than half a minute.



The fusion drive will be the culprit, an easy fix is to get an external NVME USB 3.1 enclosure and M2 card which will boost speeds from less than 100MBPS to 700MBPS and then set it to the boot drive instead of the internal fusion drive.

You can also install a SSD inplace of the fusion drive but you need to open the machine to do that which can be a faff as the screen needs to be seperated on the Imac.

This is what I used (can be done cheaper but the quality/reliability) may suffer.

The enclosures is currently £15 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-Enclosure-Tool-Free...

You can get a 1TB Kingston NVME M2 card for £43 or 500GB for £29 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-NVMe-PCIe-1000G-...

[audi321]

untakenname said:

Did the same for a relative with an identical Mac as it was taking over five minutes from the machine being powered on to being able to use it (with reopen windows when logging back in enabled), after the swap it was less than half a minute.



The fusion drive will be the culprit, an easy fix is to get an external NVME USB 3.1 enclosure and M2 card which will boost speeds from less than 100MBPS to 700MBPS and then set it to the boot drive instead of the internal fusion drive.

You can also install a SSD inplace of the fusion drive but you need to open the machine to do that which can be a faff as the screen needs to be seperated on the Imac.

This is what I used (can be done cheaper but the quality/reliability) may suffer.

The enclosures is currently £15 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-Enclosure-Tool-Free...

You can get a 1TB Kingston NVME M2 card for £43 or 500GB for £29 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-NVMe-PCIe-1000G-...

Brill thanks for the advice.....I thought these Fusion drives had an SSD in them to reduce boot times etc? Could it purely be a setup issue and the SSD isn't actually being used at all? Seems Disk Utility isn't the easiest things to establish what's using what on the partitions. Here's my screenshot, I think I have a 2tb drive but 128gb is an SSD?, volumes, partitions, etc etc it's all a mystery to me!



I'd like to 'properly' factory reset it but that also isn't as easy as you'd think on this year iMac!

Edited by audi321 on Wednesday 29th March 11:12

[wyson]

Wikipedia says 128GB ssd for your model year on a 2TB fusion drive.

Would absolutely plod as well compared to an SSD from 2023.

I would get it replaced with a modern SSD. Or get a new / second hand computer that is fully SSD based on a modern connection standard. Bet a machine of that vintage will use SATA 2 which is a bottle neck in itself.

I remember back in the days of using mechanical hard disks, a fresh install would bring some relief for a few months, but the whole laptop would slow down again. Even a fresh install was slower than a ssd equipped laptop with years of detritus.

The Fusion drive is the problem. You can polish a turd, but it will still be a turd.

Edited by wyson on Wednesday 29th March 11:32

[audi321]

Thanks guys, I'm still not convinced my drives are properly set up. So with 128gb flash drive, I assume the OS should be on there? How do I see that in Disk Utility? I can see I seem to have a partition of 500gb and 1.5tb to make the 2tb, but heaven knows how to work out these volumes etc, I think it's way to complicated to what it ought to be. I seem to have 9 volumes across 2 partitions. No mention of a 128gb flash storage anywhere!


[url]

|https://thumbsnap.com/nBGiJWX4[/url]

[wyson]

audi321 said:

Thanks guys, I'm still not convinced my drives are properly set up. So with 128gb flash drive, I assume the OS should be on there? How do I see that in Disk Utility? I can see I seem to have a partition of 500gb and 1.5tb to make the 2tb, but heaven knows how to work out these volumes etc, I think it's way to complicated to what it ought to be. I seem to have 9 volumes across 2 partitions. No mention of a 128gb flash storage anywhere!


[url]

|https://thumbsnap.com/nBGiJWX4[/url]

Is that how it works? From memory, I remember reading these sort of drives automatically cache frequently used files into the ssd part. As a user you just see contiguous space between the ssd and hdd and the split isn’t something you manually control?

Honestly remember discounting them ages ago because they were very turdish.

[Captain_Morgan]

The 128Gb ssd is embedded within the Fusion Drive, it’s not presented to the user the system manages it it’s self.

[audi321]

untakenname said:

Did the same for a relative with an identical Mac as it was taking over five minutes from the machine being powered on to being able to use it (with reopen windows when logging back in enabled), after the swap it was less than half a minute.



The fusion drive will be the culprit, an easy fix is to get an external NVME USB 3.1 enclosure and M2 card which will boost speeds from less than 100MBPS to 700MBPS and then set it to the boot drive instead of the internal fusion drive.

You can also install a SSD inplace of the fusion drive but you need to open the machine to do that which can be a faff as the screen needs to be seperated on the Imac.

This is what I used (can be done cheaper but the quality/reliability) may suffer.

The enclosures is currently £15 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-Enclosure-Tool-Free...

You can get a 1TB Kingston NVME M2 card for £43 or 500GB for £29 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-NVMe-PCIe-1000G-...

Right......ordered both your recommendations.......next question, how do I transfer the OS onto that and make the machine boot from it? Im actual fact, I went with the 1tb option as I'm thinking of making the Fusion drive totally redundant. Is it going to be easy to transfer everything over?

[camel_landy]

-Cappo- said:

Chips don't wear out.

...oh yes they do.

It's one of the reasons why SSDs have a limited write life.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-uk/000137999...

M

[JimbobVFR]

audi321 said:

What a shame, looks like the iMac Fusion drive isn't swappable for an SSD (without a LOT of hassle). Oh well.......first world problems, looks like I'll have to put up with it then........

The fusion drive is actually a standard hard drive and a tiny little PCIE SSD. (24GB IIRC on a 2105 model}

The hard drive can fairly easily be replaced with a standard SATA SSD. Taking the screen off is the most difficult part but with the proper tool (a small plastic pizza cutter) it's easy.

A SATA SSD won't be as fast as a blade SSD but much faster than a spinning disc and makes a world of difference.

You can replace the PCIE SSD if you wanted but that's a much more involved job and Apple use a non standard drive which are much more expensive obviously or require an adapter to fit

If you replace the SATA hard drive then you can format the fusion SSD part and use it as a separate drive, albeit only a small one.

[audi321]

JimbobVFR said:

audi321 said:

What a shame, looks like the iMac Fusion drive isn't swappable for an SSD (without a LOT of hassle). Oh well.......first world problems, looks like I'll have to put up with it then........

The fusion drive is actually a standard hard drive and a tiny little PCIE SSD. (24GB IIRC on a 2105 model}

The hard drive can fairly easily be replaced with a standard SATA SSD. Taking the screen off is the most difficult part but with the proper tool (a small plastic pizza cutter) it's easy.

A SATA SSD won't be as fast as a blade SSD but much faster than a spinning disc and makes a world of difference.

You can replace the PCIE SSD if you wanted but that's a much more involved job and Apple use a non standard drive which are much more expensive obviously or require an adapter to fit

If you replace the SATA hard drive then you can format the fusion SSD part and use it as a separate drive, albeit only a small one.

Thanks, I've decided to go down the external SSD route, and bin off the Fusion drive altogether. I have most things in cloud storage these days, so a 1tb external SSD should see me just fine.

[miniman]

audi321 said:

wyson said:

Fusion drive vs SSD is the answer.

SSD is a lot faster. Like magnitudes faster.

What a shame, looks like the iMac Fusion drive isn't swappable for an SSD (without a LOT of hassle). Oh well.......first world problems, looks like I'll have to put up with it then........

I did the swap, and added a load of RAM at the same time. It looks daunting but it isn't.

[untakenname]

audi321 said:

Right......ordered both your recommendations.......next question, how do I transfer the OS onto that and make the machine boot from it? Im actual fact, I went with the 1tb option as I'm thinking of making the Fusion drive totally redundant. Is it going to be easy to transfer everything over?

I believe they put the Mac into recovery mode using Ctrl-R at boot then formatted the drive in the Apple disk utility and then did the install onto the new drive and restored the data from a Time Machine backup.


This is how fast the drive is, literally 10x faster than the built in fusion drive, an internal SSD swap would max out around 500mbps afaik with the SATA bus on the iMac.

[blackscooby]

I've got an 27" 2017 iMac that I was getting frustrated with as it seemed so slow compared to my even older Mac Mini.
Difference is SSD vs FusionDrive on the iMac.

I had the FusionDrive changed for an SSD.

The performance of the SSD vs the FusionDrive on the iMac is night and day.

Cost a few bob, but considering I was going to flog it and get something newer with a lower graphics card spec etc I'm glad I stopped with the iMac (for now).

[mmm-five]

blackscooby said:

I've got an 27" 2017 iMac that I was getting frustrated with as it seemed so slow compared to my even older Mac Mini.
Difference is SSD vs FusionDrive on the iMac.

I had the FusionDrive changed for an SSD.

The performance of the SSD vs the FusionDrive on the iMac is night and day.

Cost a few bob, but considering I was going to flog it and get something newer with a lower graphics card spec etc I'm glad I stopped with the iMac (for now).

The later Fusion drives were even worse (as you've found out) as they reduced the amount of SSD from about 128GB on all models to 24GB/32GB on 1TB models and 128GB on 2TB+ models.

Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fanboy, but sometimes I really hate the penny-pinching, premium-charging gits