The“Install macOS Monterey” app is not there when you have Monterey?.

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The“Install macOS Monterey” app is not there when you have Monterey?.

I have succesfully installed Monterey on and external SATA-SSD (I have to, because I have a Fusion Drive and those drives failed after APFS was introduced). Of course this is slow. [I did this to test that upgrade. It went flawlessly]

For Catalina I had a Thunderbolt Drive, 4x as fast of course as SATA.

Now I want to do is install the Monterey on a new Thunderbolt-3 drive. How can I do that?

When I download Monterey, it is hidden, only there to update the existing OS on the SATA. The 'Install macOS Monterey' app is not in Applications. This is probably because the OS sees I already have Monterey. The new download is used to reinstall the existing build.

What way should I use to get my goal?

I still have the working Catalina on the TB drive. Should I restart from Catalina and then download (tricking the machine in this old environment)?
Should I restart in option-R Recovery mode and request a install on the new external drive ?

IMac 2017, 4K, 1TB Fusion Drive (50% dead. . )

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 12.0

Posted on Nov 27, 2021 3:09 AM

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Answer 1

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alberti-nl Author

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24 points

Nov 27, 2021 3:18 AM in response to alberti-nl

Well, its just time that heals everything, I think.

It took about an hour to download the 12GB. Then all at once the Monterey installer popped up.

Then I selected the new drive and it is crunching on it.

So no need to do complicated things! Like Sudo or Restart etc. Just have a long coffee break (better: drink a pot of tea) :-)

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Answer 2

alberti-nl Author

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Nov 28, 2021 12:30 AM in response to Barney-15E

In 2020 the start-up time of my 2017 machine became more than ten minutes. That made me unhappy. Many users suffered.

I then checked the health of the drive, at start-up it was 80%, then after an hour after a recheck would be 50%. On the internet I learned the HDD/HPS+ formatted would be ok, but with High Sierra the APFS bacame default. And the HDD would become suffacated from that new format with its own indexing system that just does not fit the spinning drives, and they just run out of gas so to say. My main use is internet, some office and photo management. That should not give wear on a HDD, even if 85% full as it was.

Now with the Thunderbolt-3 drive I have, it is <20 secs or so. That does make me happy. I have a 500Gb WD_Black for startup and a 2TB for pictures, all on the TB3 . .

The startup with the external Crucial SATA SSD drive was 45 secs. The external solution would haphazardly respond too slow to events like mouse, double clicking etc. and black out for moments. Y

You state the [known] problems with Fusion are over. So if the problems with the internal HDD indexing would be solved in Monterey, I am more than willing to check it.

Over TB3 my iMac is flawless and makes me happily wait for an M1.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

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116,764 points

Nov 28, 2021 4:58 AM in response to alberti-nl

The HDD speed problem has nothing to do with APFS. Starting with Mojave, all HDD speed optimizations were seemingly removed from the OS as Apple pretty much stopped using them as startup drives. It mattered not if you used HFS+ or APFS—the Mac would be slow if it only had an HDD.

The iMac with the tiny SSD was a different problem. A normally sized SSD fused with an HDD had no problems running the OS. I think Apple resolved that problem with Monterey, but I’m not sure. My Mini with a Fusion drive had no speed issues all the way up to Big Sur. It even worked well on High Sierra Beta with an APFS Fusion drive, but Apple released High Sierra without APFS Fusion support due to some issues unknown to us users. Once Mojave was released, APFS Fusion drives were fully supported without issue.

I don’t know what you mean by “HDD indexing.”

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Answer 4

alberti-nl Author

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Nov 28, 2021 5:17 AM in response to Barney-15E

HDD indexing: some experts said that the move in APFS to include the file index together with the files themselves (a kind of distributed index) made it almost impossible for an HDD to work: it used to have a sector of its own, telling it where everything was. Now it had to look up. In APFS under an SSD that is instantaneous, in an HDD that will take say 10 ms, thousands of hops in sequence mean you have a snail pace.

I'm just repeating what I read.

I had to stop using the Fusion under Catalina. But I could install Monterey on the Fusion Drive (mine is 25Gb SSD/1Tb HDD@540 rpm) to check if it has a solution.

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Answer 5

Barney-15E

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116,764 points

Nov 28, 2021 5:46 AM in response to alberti-nl

I'm just repeating what I read.

You repeated what you thought you read.

On an SSD, you don't care if the files are contiguous. The drive can retrieve all parts nearly simultaneously unlike an HDD which has to move the read head to each and access the parts. APFS has an inode index, too. That's how it can find the files you request.

Excessive file extents is completely irrelevant to the operating system. The files are all contiguous. Files break apart when they are edited because the edited file becomes larger than the original contiguous file and can't fully fit into the space allocated. It is then split between extents. The operating system is never edited and rewritten back to disk. All parts of the OS are written contiguously and are never split, so the lack of file extents management of APFS is irrelevant.

As I stated before, running Mojave or later from an HDD only (whether HFS+ or APFS) is slow because the caching and other optimizations were removed as they were unnecessary in the hardware Apple was selling at the time. Running Mojave on an HDD formatted HFS+ was just as slow as running it on an HDD formatted APFS. It was not a file extents problem.

If you do a lot of large file editing (video editing) on an HDD formatted with APFS, it will be incredibly slow due to the files breaking apart and not being fixed. But, that problem doesn't exist for the operating system or backup drives as the files are never re-written back to disk.

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Answer 6

Barney-15E

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116,764 points

Nov 27, 2021 5:25 AM in response to alberti-nl

(I have to, because I have a Fusion Drive and those drives failed after APFS was introduced).

Did the drives both actually fail? APFS works fine with Fusion drives.

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The“Install macOS Monterey” app is not there when you have Monterey?.

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