MacBook Pro takes about 45 seconds to boot up with SSD, no faster than with hard drive

I have a month old 13 inch Macbook Pro (8GB RAM and 2.9 Ghz i7) and today I swapped the stock HD for a Samsung 840 Pro. I've shut it down and booted up several times with the SSD installed and it takes just about 45 seconds each time. Is this normal?

It seems abnormally slow as I've heard MBP's with a SSD take between 10 and 25 seconds to boot up. It took about 45 seconds with the stock HD too.

Applications startup notably faster and it's not really a problem, but I'm curious.

Any thoughts? Common problems that might cause this?

Christophe Prakash

Posted 2013-08-15T23:59:26.377

Reputation: 203

1Did you clone copy the drive or did you install the SSD and install Mountain Lion from scratch? – Blackbeagle – 2013-08-16T03:09:56.763

A couple thoughts: Sometimes the firmware has a bootup delay preprogrammed to allow rotating drives to spinup, to work around badly designed controllers that won't respond until the drive is booted, spun up, and ready. Or the firmware may be looking for EFI tables which existed on the old drive, retrying several times before proceeding to normal boot. Unfortunately, getting to these types of settings in the Mac firmware isn't easy. – Ben Voigt – 2013-08-16T03:10:02.000

Answers

I figured it out!

I completely removed the old HD, so no it was not booting from that. But on startup the machine was still looking for the old HD, thus the delay. All I had to do was go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and choose my SSD from the menu.

The machine restarts automatically after that and it was up in 10 seconds :)

Christophe Prakash

Posted 2013-08-15T23:59:26.377

Reputation: 203

Did you remove the original drive or did you put it in e.g. an optical caddy for extra storage? EFI firmware uses a signature to find the bootloader, not the bus port number, so it'll use the spinning disk for the initial parts of the boot process if that disk is present.

And my coworker ran into similar issues where it'd go looking for the disk matching the signature, and take even longer if not present. I forget what fixed it for him, I'll see if he remembers.

Do reconfigure EFI and select your boot device configuration, even if it is still booting, because it could be trying to use an existing configuration and falling back to a legacy/compatible search only after all retries fail.

Ben Voigt

Posted 2013-08-15T23:59:26.377

Reputation: 6 052