Why is Lion so slow?

thanks jwkanvik, some people just can't be helpful. did you ever find a firmware update jw? if not, tell me your drive model number and I'll happily search for one for you.

JWKanvik wrote:

Hey, stop the crap. I started this thread. I am not a Mac vet...in fact, this is my first Mac. Please stop with the flames. If you are having a similar issue, or have a helpful solution, please feel free to contribute. Otherwise, keep it yourself.

A thread you lost control of when you marked it with a correct answer on July 21st and let it run riot with trolls directing people here instead of advising them on opening their own threads to deal with their own problems. If you look, I was not replying to you but to another poster who would rather rant than address his specific problem in his specific thread. Sooner this load of confused, convoluted and misguided nonsense is swept away, the sooner we can make room for those who actually wish to find their problems and resolve them.

As it is, you marked this thread closed and left it behind for all the idiots, like myself! lol

Cheers and happy days

refer to one of my much older posts in this thread, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3197249?answerId=16409434022#16409434022 for instructions since I don't feel like retyping it all lol. it's pretty easy to find your full model number without removing the drive. once you have it just paste it here and I'll look it up for you.

Omg omg omg ....! Can't believe.

I Turned-Off my FileVault, and I am so fast ... logged in immediately, all applications are opening faster.

Will update soon again.

ok, just a quick report back here on the drive firmware possible solution for me at least - it appears my drive, a Seagate 500GB ST9500420AS, does not have a firmware update available. I suppose I could try the update for similar models, but since the firmware updater is Windows only, I'd need to reinstall my copy of Fusion and Windows from before the clean install I did 2 weeks ago. And the thought of doing it while fending off the beachballs makes my teeth hurt. I'm just gonna put in a new hard drive. Anyone have any suggestions? What drives seem to handle Lion ok?

Oh, and hey Neil: you're pretty ******* brave sitting there, lobbing shots from behind your keyboard, aren't you? Something tells me you're a lot more weaselly with your big mouth when you have to look someone in the eye.

chr2 wrote:

Oh, and hey Neil: you're pretty ******* brave sitting there, lobbing shots from behind your keyboard, aren't you? Something tells me you're a lot more weaselly with your big mouth when you have to look someone in the eye.

Oh isn't your Cam working either Mr. Adult Vet? Just not your year really is it? Got a Lemon Drive and a bad copy of Lion. There is always Windows for you at least.

Happy Trails Cowgirl

chr2, try this. http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/Momentus-ST9500420AS- Firmware-Update/td-p/33862/page/11

it seems according to this user that the seagate drive you're using has problems with mac when running at high speed, there's a jumper setting to drop the speed down to 1.5 which reports say is working pretty well with osx.

since you have a seagate drive this might make finding firmware easier http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/utils/drivedetect.exe and finally, windows MUST be installed via bootcamp to update the firmware, NOT vmware or parallels.

if you don't want to install windows via bootcamp, most seagate drives have a bootable upgrade cd image you can download and burn. burn the iso, stick disk in drive, hold option while turning on mac to get the boot menu. you can also yank the drive and install it into a desktop or something to do the update.

So the problem is my drive is too fast & I need to throttle it down for Lion to catch up? Somehow I don't think Steve woulda been crazy about that outcome. Bstone, I gotta say, you are a warrior, the way you go after a problem! Love the tenacity, along with the expertise. But I'm throwing in the towel on this one. Having to muck with jumpers to slow down a six months old drive is just a bridge too far for me at this pt. I got billable work to do and limited appetite for more of this science project. My new Macbk Pro arrives Thursday.

well that's one theory I found in another forum for your drive. 😝 if the drive detect tool said there was no new firmware for you then that's all you really can do I guess. sadly not all computers are created equal, or in this case hard drives. I hope apple fixes this flaw in lion cause it shouldn't behave like this. I wish there was more I could do to help but it appears lion is expecting specific input from the drive and is stalling while waiting on it. older firmwares are not sending that input, or it could be other way around and lion is sending commands to the drive that the drive doesn't understand. regardless, it's a problem with the way lion is treating the drives. some drives have a firmware update to work around this, some don't.... but it shouldn't be up to the drive manufacturers to release an update to mimic the commands lion wants to fix a flaw in lion. it's apples problem. it's time they man up to it and patch it.

if anyone else needs some help please review this entire thread, there's a lot of fixes here, all of them seem to help to one degree or another, however the firmware fix seems to be the best option if your drive has a new firmware. I believe all the information needed to solve this problem for everyone is here, some fixes may not be available for you depending on your hard drive manufacturer, but hopefully it will get you by till apple fixes it. please send in your complaints to the apples feedback page about this problem, and it would be a good idea to include a link to this thread when you do.

thankyou everyone, and good luck hounding apple into a permanant fix.

WHAT FINALLY WORKED FOR ME...

I have made a few posts throughout this thread, from very early on, as I too had the problem of updating to Lion and things slowing way down. I tried many of the suggestions here, but none worked. The one I didn't try, which I suspect may have worked, was a fresh install of Lion.

I decided, however, that if I was going to go through all the work of doing a fresh install, I would take this time to upgrade my boot drive to an SSD hard drive (solid state drive). When I did this, the problem completely went away, and of course, everything was even more lighting fast by using an SSD drive.

After fixing the problem completely with the new SSD drive, my suspeciouns are that it was, as some here have also said, hard drive related. The drive I was using didn't have any updated drivers for lion, so I wasn't able to try that, but by no longer using the drive, it fixed the problem. Here is why I further believe this...I decided to NOT do a fresh install with Lion, just to test if it was the drive or the OS set up. I actually used Carbon Copy Cone to completely clone my old drive to the new SSD drive. In other words, NOTHING changed with my OS' set up, the apps I was using, how they were installed, etc. The ONLY thing that changed, was booting from a different drive, which contained the OS and all my apps, etc.

This isn't obviously the solution for everyone, but I wanted to post to at least share my experience that I do believe it's hard drive/driver related. You should for sure try updating your boot drive's drivers, if new ones are available for your particular drive.

If you have the $$$, I'd HIGHLY recommend upgrading to an SSD drive. It was a pretty easy process using Carbon Copy Clone. It feels like I have a completely new machine! (I did read/write tests and the SSD is 400% faster than my old drive.) My Mac Pro boots in 15 seconds, and apps pop open, even Photoshop, Xcode, etc. It's wonderful! After having lived with the slow Lion problem, to jumping to not only fixing that problem, but a 400% faster drive, I'm in heaven!

Kevin

Thanks for sharing Kevin.

My HDD also didn't have firmware updates available from it and although my previous tips posted on this thread got me back to an acceptable working speed on Lion I still felt it wasn't quite as fast as Snow Leopard); so I

bought a SSD drive myself BUT had been planning to take the opportunity to do a fresh install as well.

Kind of tragic because being unable to find the time to do this has meant I've had the $800 drive sitting on the shelf for nearly 2 weeks now! 😟

With your news that really it's very much worth just doing a Carbon Copy Clone first I think I'll try that first. Excited. Can't wait to get it going now!

@rnolds81: Here is the article I used: http://www.startupcto.com/server-tech/macosx/mac-internal-drive-upgrade

Was super easy to do. You're going to be kicking yourself for not having done it earlier. Be ready for some serious happy dancing. I did this a couple of days ago, and the smile is STILL on my face. =)

One tip not metioned in the article: After I did the clone, I changed the name of my new drive to match the old one so that all the paths stored in any apps were still correct. I also repared permissions after. I also didn't physically move the disks, but just changed the boot disk in the Mac's settings (Settings > Startup Disk). Good luck.

Just did firmware upgrade on ST95005620AS to version SD28. OS start reponding like a charme!!!

Red before / Blue After upgrade: http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=558604&doc2=558610

Mackbook pro 15.4-inch: 2.4GHz(MA896LL/A),

Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

How cool is it without freezing every 20 second 😉

finaly disk going to sleep, fan's not working like jet on takigoff. NICEEEEE!!!!!!!