Recently, I moved my primary computing from an iMac (failed power supply) over to a Mac Mini. I should note that the Mac Mini is one of my favourite machines, and has been since its inception. Now, when I went about moving everything around, I built one Mini out of the parts of 2, in order to combine all of the fastest bits. Not a hard task, since the Mini is so easy to work on. In my calculated build, I opted to install two 500GB rotational hard drives into the unit, leaving my 1TB SSD in the nonfunctional iMac, as I plan on eventually getting it repaired. Lets discuss how that played out, shall we?
Obviously, there are some read/write differences between solid state and rotational. There are also data arrangement considerations, lifespan, corruption issues, and so on. But, I reasoned that if I was using an external backup solution, and one of the internals for secondary storage, things out to go pretty well. After all, the majority of computers in the world still use rotational hard drives, so this should be easy. Right? Yeah…maybe not.
The first obvious sign that this was going to need revision was boot time. I’m used to the Mac OS booting in 12-15 seconds. My timed boot from startup chime to login screen was pushing 90 seconds. Yuck city. I found also that applications were taking 5-10, and in several cases, 20 bounces before becoming active. Then there was refresh. Apps had to do a lot of “thinking” in order to refresh themselves. And of course, I was getting that dreaded beachball on a regular basis as the computer was processing things, or caching data back and forth. Even with 16GB of ram, Virtual Memory was still making things less than ideal. And then, there was this nascent desire to bring this machine up to parity OS wise, and get 10.13 installed. It was showing some incompatibility with newer processes that were running my my MacBook Pro, and iPhone, and that needed addressing as well.
In all, I lasted 3 weeks with rotational hard drives. I finally broke down, and decided it was time to rework everything at about 8PM on a Friday night. Thus, my next adventure began.
First, I pulled the 2.5” SSD out of my iMac. This meant getting through the adhesive (easy if you know how), and extracting said drive. Next, said drive was connected to my MBP via a thunderbolt/SATA sled (thank you Seagate), and all data was migrated/backed up to a USB 3 external. this process via Carbon Copy Cloner, took maybe 90 minutes.
Next, it was time to rebuild the mac mini. I pulled out the rotational drive that had been the boot drive, and removed it’s mounting screws and cables. It then got set aside. I attached everything to the SSD. and installed it in the Mac Mini. I then booted the Mac Mini from a 10.13 USB installer I’d created (Terminal is your friend!), and formatted the drive as APFS (see my previous post about APFS). Installing 10.13 took about 15 minutes.
With 10.13 installed, I booted the system and it was at a speed I expected and was happy with. I then migrated my data back from my old hard drive via Migration assistant. This took around 3 hours. Lastly, I pulled some data that I’d backed up from my old install on my SSD, and everything was back up and running.
So, if we review, I spent the entire evening rebuilding a Mac Mini. Or rather, I spent 20 minutes rebuilding a Mac Mini, and several hours moving data around. The bottlenecks in this process were most definitely the rotational hard drives I was using. But the big question becomes, was it worth it? Well, the newly built machine boots in half the time. I have no latency when launching apps or refreshing apps. The system doesn’t pinwheel at all. Thanks to running an APFS based system, data movement is faster as well. Duplications are instantaneous, and its glorious.
Finally, to summarize my take away here. I’m relatively sure I cant use a rotational hard drive based system as my primary, ever again. My perception has become accustomed to the speed and access times of SSDs. And when you account for data caching, virtual memory, access times, and stability, the old paradigm really is dead. Moving forward, if given the option to buy a machine with a rotational drive, or an SSD, I’ll always pick the SSD. And I would urge you to consider the same. And not just for right now. But for you 3 years from now, when you’ve had that computer a while.
And yes, one last thing. I know that previous paragraph was marked “finally.” But we have to consider the business side of the equation. Lets think unit life cycle, hardware longevity and hardware functionality over the long term. SSD’s are of benefit here if purchased initially. But, if you have machines that haven’t yet hit that phasing out mark, but are showing some age (your users are complaining about slowness), throwing an SSD into those machines is cheaper than a new unit, and will breathe a lot of life into the existing computer. And that drive will have a warranty, which is no bad thing either!