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Slow Start-up after installing new hard drive

I just installed a new Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT in my late 2008 MacBook. Seems to work fine once things are running but start-up is taking as much as 1 minute. Previous Hard Drive was the factory 160 GB unit and it started twice as fast. Is it normal for start-up to take longer with a bigger hard drive?

MacBook 13" late 2008 Aluminum, Mac OS X (10.6.2), Crucial 4GB, WD 500 GB

Posted on Feb 17, 2010 10:37 PM

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25 replies

Feb 18, 2010 5:42 PM in response to Crumm

Not much response around here?

Something else I just noticed is that the old hard drive had 117.82 GB used on it and the new one has 109.05 used on it. I transferred the data and applications using “Restore System from Time Machine”. Is there some stuff on the old drive that was not needed or did it not all get transferred?

Feb 28, 2010 5:38 PM in response to Crumm

Sorry you're not getting any responses. I guess sometimes a new thread can fall through the cracks.

I'm not much help on this one but I wanted to chime in because I'm having the same problem. I just put a brand new Hitachi Travelstar 7k500 7200 16gb hard drive in my macbook pro and, although everything seems to be running well (and the drive is super quiet), my start up time is considerably slower.

I cloned my original drive to the new drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and everything seems to be identical. So, I'm a bit confused as to why the start up is so much much slower.

I should add, there is one more variable for me. I upgraded my ram from 2 to 4gb (OWC modules) at the same time I replaced the drive. However, the ram is fully recognized and programs seem to be loading and running at least as quickly as before.

If I find anything out I'll check back in.

-Steve

Mar 4, 2010 3:55 PM in response to Adam White

No disrespect intended, I was simply answering question the quickest way I knew how. Your help is greatly appreciated.

When I installed the new Hard Drive I used my Snow Leopard disk and time machine back-up off a portable hard drive. Backup was updated seconds before removing old hard drive. Would clone be better? Little late to clone as new hard drive now has more on it than the old will hold.

Mar 4, 2010 4:00 PM in response to Crumm

Crumm, Steven,

I have just installed a Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200RPM 320GB hard drive and I am having the same problem. When I switch on my Macbook Pro it hear the startup chime but then the apple logo does not appear for quite a long time. Once it appears it then boots up in about the same amount of time it used to take. This suggests to me it is carrying out some task it does not need to.

I also cloned my old hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, so I have concerns that this is some oddity with the combination of some Western Digital hard drives and Carbon Copy Cloner. Given the how recent all these posts are it could be something to do with the recent build of Carbon Copy Cloner, I presume you all downloaded the free version from the web?

If I find anything else out I will write back, if you could too that would be great.

Mar 4, 2010 4:08 PM in response to Mike.DDD

" Given the how recent all these posts are it could be something to do with the recent build of Carbon Copy Cloner, I presume you all downloaded the free version from the web?"

I did not use a cloner, I used time machine and my Snow Leopard disk yet we are both having the same trouble so I don't think it is your cloner. Could be something with WD harddrives?

Mar 4, 2010 4:21 PM in response to Mike.DDD

Mike,

Although I did use CCC, my new drive is a Hitachi 7200RPM 500GB 16MB drive. The drive itself seems to fly.

I did notice that zapping the PRam helped a bit but then it seemed to slow down a little a day later. Weird.

All bets are off for me now because I just upgraded to Leopard from Tiger. Man, what a big pain in the #$@! that was. I didn't know that because my Mac is Intel that I needed to choose "GUID Partition Scheme" when I formatted my new drive. Anyway, it was a pain to reformat it but it's up and running now. And start up is still a bit slower...

Slow Start-up after installing new hard drive

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