Slow boot time after update to Mojave - External SSD

I can confirm that just moving my external SSD from USB to Thunderbolt enclosure solves the delay at Mojave startup. I use Delock 42510 (85 EUR at amazon.it + 11 EUR Standard shipping with DHL road) and an Apple Thunderbolt cable (35 EUR).

In my opinion UEFI bootloader either tries to recognize the drive as SSD or wants to read its Firmware revision. This looks like a problem in UEFI and most probably is related to the limit that Apple put on external HDDs to use APFS last year.

Looking at System Information and DriveDX logs, I found several differences. In the Thunderbolt enclosure, drive is recognized as SSD with its Firmware revision, non-Removable, with native S.M.A.R.T. support, Bus Type = SATA, ATA Features = 0x-1, SATA Features = 0x2e. TRIM is not enabled.

In the USB enclosure, drive is not recognized as SSD, it's Removable, there is no Firmware revision, no native S.M.A.R.T. support, Bus Type = USB, ATA Features = 0x20, SATA Features = 0x-1. TRIM is not supported.

Hi PF2UK. I’ve posted this workaround couple times but this is a very long thread so you may not have seen. I got this from Mike Bombich of Bombich Software who developed Carbon Copy Cloner. It reduced my Mojave boot time on Samsung T5 SSD from 3-5 mins toreboot frequently and this startup delay is a showstopper for you, I have one potential workaround – you could boot back to the HDD, erase† the T5 as HFS+, then clone the HDD --> SSD. Some people have reported that the HFS+ formatted T5 did not experience the startup delay. You can't install Mojave onto the T5 via the Mojave Installer without converting it to APFS, but you can clone your Mojave to an HFS+ formatted volume, and the format will not change.

† You have to [erase the whole device](When you erase an APFS-formatted startup disk, erase the whole APFS container) for "Mac OS Extended, Journaled" to be one of the formatting options.”

PROBLEM SOLVED (WITH A THUNDERBOLT ENCLOSURE)

PROBLEM:

iMac late 2012. external eve 850 ssd via usb.

Mojave 10.14.1 slow boot - 5-6 minutes. white screen.

SOLUTION:

1.BOUGHT THIS THUNDERBOLT ENCLOSURE on ebay

LaCie Rugged 1TB Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive (STEV1000400)

it is thunderbolt 1 - because my mac supports only that version of thunderbolt

2.REMOVED 4 SCREWS FROM THIS LACIE THUNDERBOLT ENCLOSURE,

then took out the HD from it, and put my ssd into it. very easy - see how

this this guy here did it. https://willhaley.com/blog/thunderbolt-enclosure/

Boot time reduced from 5 minutes to 30 seconds when i first turned on my mac

4.I WENT FURTHER. opened system preferences\startup disk
- Reselected the ssd again and hit restart

5.THEN I ENABLED TRIM.
opened Terminal typed

sudo trimforce enable

entered my password then mac restarted.

now boot time is 23-24 seconds (like it was on High Sierra) compared to 5 minutes.

i am happy AF 🙂

i really couldn’t wait more for solution from apple so i decided to spend extra 120$ to buy an enclousure and the problem is solved.

hope this helps someone.

Problem solved (really slow booting time from external SSD connected via USB) by converting the drive with APFS to HFS+ Converter by Paragon Software, it took a whole night to make the conversion, but now boot times are right again!

Thanks for the suggestion

If you put that Samsung SSD into a USB2 drive enclosure, you can expect that speed limitation on first boot, and waking from sleep. If it is in a USB3 enclosure, swap out that USB3 drive cable for another one, and retest boot time.

If you have any USB2 connections to your iMac, or any hub, unplug them before booting and see if these peripherals are impacting your boot time.

Boot into recovery mode by holding down Control-R as you boot your system, and wait until the macOS Utilities window appears. Then, select Startup Disk from the Apple menu. You can select the preferred startup disk from the list of icons that refer to your attached bootable disks. Make sure that a disk icon is highlighted in the Startup Disks window before you close the window! (Having no icon selected will cause the Mac to hunt for and choose the first bootable disk it finds.)

Restart your Mac, and see if this speeds up the boot process.

It seems as if we have exactly three solutions at hand for the time being:

a) Buy a Thunderbolt enclosure (plus a Thunderbolt cable, those are not too cheap either) such as the Delock 42510 - expensive (the Delock costs about 100 USD), but works momentarily without any decrease in performance compared to USB-3-enclosures.

b) Use the Paragon APFS to HFS+ converter. This solution is free, but as always when playing around with file systems, it bears a certain risk of incompatibilities, maybe even data loss, plus you are moving outside of Apples specifications too when running Mojave with HFS+ on your system volume. Moreover, you lose the advantages of APFS (yes, they exist) such as ultra fast file copying and better overall performance on SSDs.

c) Wait for the release of macOS 10.14.1. It's said to resolve the boot delay problem (but this remains unverified ATM). macOS 10.14.1 shouldn't be too far away as the third pre-release version was already seeded to the developers a couple of days ago.

I think, for now c) is a viable solution. If 10.14.1 should not resolve the problem after all, I might go for a)...

Yes, Thunderbolt enclosures solve the slow boot delay (at least for me and many other users). I tested Delock 42510 (£126.00) with Apple Thunderbolt cable (£25). Then I tested Akitio eSata to Thunderbolt adapter (£97) which also boots very fast.

Using Thunderbolt has other advantages: you may enable TRIM on your SSD and have native SMART data support without the "SAT SMART Driver" kernel extension. For example Mojave just reported that it had trimmed 34 million blocks on my 256GB SSD for 2 sec. at startup.

I'm currently selling Delock 42510 enclosure + Thunderbolt cable on ebay.co.uk, both for £116.00 (ships in Europe).

Hello from Singapore.

This is how I shorten my slow boot up in Mojave 10.14.1 (ext USB3 SSD.)

I regularly delete all the local Time Machine snapshots in terminal. It seems some of the slow boot up is because macOS checks the integrity of the snapshots saved, up to 24 of them.

The command to list the snapshots is

$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

To delete 100GB worth, execute

You'll have to execute above again if you still have some snapshots left behind.

On your next boot up you'll noticed it now boots obviously faster then when you had a lot of snapshots! My experience is it's down to roughly under 1 minute (which is still too long compared to High Sierra) from 3-4 minutes.

Unfortunately new snapshots are saved overtime so the boot up slows down again eventually until you cannot tolerate it anymore. I'd just repeat the process.

I must say I do not really know the consequences of deleting local snapshots. I use my Time Machine to recover accidentally erased individual files only, and not to restore the system entirely and having few snapshots has been fine.

Good luck.

All, another solution that worked for me. I'm using late 2013 iMac Mojave with regular 1Tb HDD that's got VERY slow despite only using 150Gb, so now trying to run whole system on Samsung 250gb T5 SDD. I formatted T5 as APFS and used Carbon Copy Clone ("CCC") to copy everything to the T5 and then set T5 as Startup Disk from Preferences. Boot time to Log In screen was snail-like 3-5 minutes with blank screen half that time! After raising the issue with Bombich Software (developers of CCC), eventually Mike Bombich himself suggested "You could boot back to the HDD, erase the entire T5 as HFS+, then clone the HDD --> SSD. Some people have reported that the HFS+ formatted T5 did not experience the startup delay. You can't install Mojave onto the T5 via the Mojave Installer without converting it to APFS, but you can clone your Mojave to an HFS+ formatted volume, and the format will not change." Tried that and Power On to login now 35 secs with log in and all apps loading instantly! Thank you Mike - great support and CCC is a great product!

Hi all, I believe there is USB bug in Mojave which should be fixed with next update. I had exactly the same issue - boot time prolonged from 20 sec to 2 mins after Mojave installed on external SSD drive. But only USB3 connection is affected - if I connect the same drive via Thunderbolt (drive has dual interface USB3/Thunderbolt2), boot time is around 20 secs again with no other changes. And if I change cable again to USB, then I need to wait 2 minutes again.

Sorry chunk missed from post just now for some reason. My boot time on T5 reduced from 3-5 mins to < 1 min. Workaround not supported by Apple but no probs so far : “if you reboot frequently and this startup delay is a showstopper for you, I have one potential workaround – you could boot back to the HDD, erase† the T5 as HFS+, then clone the HDD --> SSD. Some people have reported that the HFS+ formatted T5 did not experience the startup delay. You can't install Mojave onto the T5 via the Mojave Installer without converting it to APFS, but you can clone your Mojave to an HFS+ formatted volume, and the format will not change.

† You have to [erase the

whole device](When you erase an APFS-formatted startup disk, erase the whole APFS container) for "Mac OS Extended, Journaled" to be one of the formatting options.”

Hi Glenn, I think Jaap followed my post below that was originally from Mike Bombich of Bombich Software: Change boot drive back to the HDD, erase the SDD as HFS+ Format , then clone the HDD --> SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner. You can't install Mojave onto the SDD via the Mojave Installer without converting it to APFS, but you can clone your Mojave to an HFS+ formatted volume, and the format will not change.

You have to erase the whole SSD device(When you erase an APFS-formatted startup disk, erase the whole APFS container) for "Mac OS Extended, Journaled" to be one of the formatting options.

Be aware that Apple do not support this work around! Best back up everything first and regularly after. But has worked for me for weeks now. Good luck!

I have a possible solution

i have just been on a call with apple support... they did a bit of a search and came back with the suggestion that the conversion from hfs to apfs wasn’t doing something properly... so i took my old drive and erased it as GUID partitioning but with APFS instead of doing th3 hfs to apfs conversion

My booting is now much quicker. About a minute instead of 90 minutes...

After an erase and format as APFS, I now get 1 minute and 10 seconds.

That's with 2x external APFS formatted SSD drives. A 500GB Samsung 860(?) EVO and a 1TB Sandisk Extreme SSD. The Samsung has about 400GB on it. The Extreme has about the same.

Now, 1 minute might not sound good compared to some peoples boot times, but that may simply be that APFS filesystems take a few seconds longer to mount... And it's way better than my previous 90 minute boot times...

So in conclusion I'd say there is definitely something wrong with the HFS to APFS conversion process. It would be nice it apple fixed that, because it's annoying as ****, and it's taken several days of copying data around when the OS itself advertises HFS to APFS conversion... (i.e. Apple, either don't offer the conversion and DOCUMENT that you need to erase and format as APFS, or make it work reliably).