My SSD on my Mac Book Pro got some files corrupted and I had to replace it. I am currently doing a clean install of El Capitan and it is taking FOREVER. It has been 10 hours so far and the status bar is at roughly 75%.
I have a brand new SSD, i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 1Gbps Internet access speed. To take that long to install and OS is just ridiculous. I used to be an Apple fanboy...
MacBook Pro
You can have 10GigE Ethernet speed, but the network health of the route from your location to the Apple download server will determine the progress speed of the download. Your average network speed is not likely to be 1 Gbps. The El Capitan download is 6.19 GB, and Yosemite is 5.7 GB.
Although my El Capitan download took about 25 minutes, I did find the clean install to a boot SSD took an unusually long time, and hung for a lengthy period before it eventually finished. Total download and elapsed time to install and final boot was slightly more than an hour.
If there are issues with the target installation drive, then the process could be delayed for an arbitrarily long time.
Good luck with the Genius, there might even be some grace period on your AppleCare.
Downloading is a function of connection. Installation is dependent on your hardware. Your connection may be 1Gbps but read this while you are waiting...
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=343089
That said, it is a very long download from Apple.
Something is very wrong with that Mac. I performed numerous downloads and installations and none of them took more than a couple of hours at most, and I can only dream of a 1 Gbps Internet speed. That's a couple orders of magnitude greater than anything I can usually realize in practice.
See what the Genius Bar has to say.
I agree with you. My download of El Capitan took 2 minutes to download the 6.19 GB. And then 12 hours to install on a new and formated SSD.
And then it runs terribly slow. I have reset the PRAM and SMC as described here: http://elcapitanslow.com/, I have tested the RAM by removing and swapping the memory sticks, but it made no difference. Unless the SSD is bad, I have no other idea what else could be the problem. I will have to wait and see what the guys at the Genius Bar have to say. Thank for your input.
macjack, thank you for your reply. It is a very good article. I understand that it is matter of connection and hardware. But in my humble opinion it should not take 12 hours plus to install an OS on a computer. I downloaded more that 6 GB of the install. I don't know how much more data does it need to download from Internet to complete the install. Anyways, the install finally completed and it is running extremely slow. Before my drive died, it used to take 12 seconds for the OS to come to a login screen. Now with a SSD again, it takes 10 min to do that. Unfortunately my Apple care just expired. (Isn't that always the case...) I will be taking it to the Genius Desk tomorrow to see if they can figure out what the issue could be. I might try to Install Yosemite and see if the problem goes away. If not, I am going to go with Ubuntu on a cheap hardware and call it good.
At any rate, not very impressed to say the least.
Thank you again for your reply.
Clean install of El Capitan takes forever
