Slow boot on Mac Pro

any luck with this having similar problem

The gray Apple loads off your boot device. A long time until the gray Apple appears (like over a minute) indicates trouble with the Boot device.

Go back to basics if you're really focused on this, remove everything except stock GPU/RAM (maybe) and only a single HD that you'll clean install a fresh OS (definitely), do not migrate anything at this point. Let the machine boot, leave it in for 10 minutes so spotlight can finish and run both a PRAM and SMC reset. Give it a couple of restarts and report back times.

yep noybus, same here have tried every combination there is! it seems to be a problem before the boot (apple chime), like the efi is slow or something...

Just found this thread in a Google search.

I've been having similarly long boot times, thought I haven't pulled out the stop watch.

Mid 2010 MacPro 8-Core (Mavericks OS X 10.9.1)

96GB Samsung RAM (1066MHz DDR3)

OS X boot drive: Mercury Accelsior (240GB) PCIe SSD (2x120GB RAID-0)

Win 7 boot drive: Samsung 840 EVO (250GB) in lower optical drive bay

Drive bays 1-3: 6GB (3x2GB) RAID-0 Array (File Server)

Bay 4: 2GB (for select rsync backups from files server)

CalDigit USB3+eSATA card

ATI Radeon 5770

PRAM, SMC resets have not produced any imporvements. I'm thinking there is something witht the EFI... most of my wait time at boot is with the spinning wheel at the Apple logo screen.

I'd swear that Win 7 boots faster... Any Ideas??

gaukler-

Your setup is interesting, but a little troubling. (RAID 0 striped Boot Drive on two SSDs)

RAID, when used on Rotating drives, gets its speedup from overlapping seeks on two drives. Later blocks in the file (that were not already in the drive cache from the initial read) are provided more quickly because the third and subsequent seek on the same file is overlapped.

• When the drive latency is very low (as with SSD drives) the payback from striped RAID is small.

• This speedup only happens when Large files are being read (larger than twice the size of a Track, more than about 30 blocks), and no other intervening requests for different files occur in the interim. Operating System accesses do not follow a pattern that gives good speedup.

• Striped RAID on the Boot drive precludes a Recovery_HD on that drive. (That is acceptable as long as you have one somewhere else.)

• RAID on an SSD Array precludes the use of TRIM. This means your SSD may be drowning in Deleted Data, slowing you down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

--------

It would be better to boot your Mac from a single SSD, and use that SSD RAID array for scratch data, where accesses would be to large single files and you would get maximum speedup.

Must be those GB drives you are still using ;-)

1-3: 6GB (3x2GB) RAID-0 Array (File Server)

PCI SSD cards have been known to add substantially to boot times.

I have Sonnet Tempo SSD - and it does not though. I also have Samsung 840 and 840 EVOs.

an SSD RAID, might if you must just JBOD to have a larger volume, in fact putting the system on native SATA II drive bus is absolutely fine. Best policy use for PCIe SSDs come with scratch, lightroom, aperture, audio - all data type. You can boot from one, but do you need 500GB? The 840 EVO 750GB is $399, $299 for 500GB. Usually happens when you have a lot of plugins and using boot drive for scratch and/or for data.

One person found that using TRIM Enabler 3.x made dramatic improvement in IO, esp. writes. The EVO series are also better designed and tuned.

i too had this problem with slow boot up from ssd, i had just updated to 8gb ram and a crucial m500 480gb ssd. i solved this by clicking on the apple in the menu bar-system preferences-startup disc and just select th disc you want to boot from. from power on to log in screen is 8 seconds now. hope this helps.