Slow boot time after update to Mojave - External SSD

I've been considering buying a thunderbolt enclosure for a few weeks. I've doubts that Apple solves this problem in the short term.

I've an IMac Late 2003 with thunderbolt 1. I'm not sure to buy a Thunderbolt 1/2 enclosure. I think it's a rather obsolete technology that's being replaced by Thunderbolt 3. I think it would be better to buy a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, also thinking about a possible future (not near) update of my IMac.

Someone has experience in using the Apple adapter Thunderbolt2 <-> Thunderbolt3?

It's very expensive, but it seems the only one that is bidirectional (connecting Thunderbolt 3 devices to Thunderbolt1/2 computers)

They are expensive. I suppose the ones listed on this thread are the right ones to get. Although I have the money to do so, I won't. I think it's ridiculous for Apple to hobble boot process and you have to spend over a hundred dollars just to fix it.

I'm agree with you. It's ridiculous, but I get the feeling that Apple is not going to solve this issue.

But it's more ridiculous to spend more than $2.000 to buy a new Imac with an internal SSD only to solve this problem.

My Imac works perfectly and I just want a normal boot time (like the one I had with High Sierra).

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...

I dont boot from my external. Boot is internal, external is just user data.

But yeah erase as apfs on the external ssd ‘appears’ to have fixed it. But i have only booted once and the drive was empty, not 80% full like normal. Copying data back now to test some more

I should be able to do more testing today. Currently i am copying my data to a nas so when thats finished it will b erase as apfs, copy back and boot on my sandisk extreme.

thinking about the process... HFS and APFS arec very different beasts... and the ‘conversion’ happens really quickly... far too quickly for me to believe they do a complete conversion at the time. I am wondering if the conversion is simply a quick setup. And then in the background somewhere at various points the filesystem is gradually migrated a piece at a time from actual hfs on the disk to apfs... and the boot process is somehow confused and spins for a bit..

does anyone have an external ssd that is used a lot, but was converted some time ago? Do they have the same issue?

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).

Nice work and its really helpful for us out here. You are right the 1 min is not as bad a 2 or 2.5 min, but it doesn't quite fix the problem entirely. Remember when you can boot from cold within 20-30 seconds? Thats what it should be. Apple really dropped the ball on this one and several updated has gone by with no resolution. At this point Apple has done a TERRIBLE job with Mojave and loyal users.

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

Stopped using temporary solution. Mojave on a HFS+ formatted SSD.

(iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, mid 2015) and OWC Envoy Pro EX built with Apple 256GB SSD)

There are more errors. Delay on awakening standby mode. Another USB 3.0 bus error, Mojave does not recognize my Audioquest Beetle(DAC). Mojave on a HFS+ formatted SSD can not be updated.

Over 29 years use Apple (system 6 to High Sierra) support was never so disappointing.

Agreed 100%. Apple need to fix this. It would appear (On my mac-pro 2013 anyway) that this is somewhere in firmware. Because it is slow BEFORE any logs appear when booting MacOS in verbose mode, and also affects booting with windows (BootCamp via an external SSD USB attached)

I almost did that till I read that Mojave does not support such format. Some users report that updates will no longer work in Mojave among other glitches. I can't verify this myself since I haven't done it. Please let us know if you are having or starting to experience glitches.

What I see is some boots go in pretty normally, a little slower than I would like but acceptable, then others seem to stall almost like they are indexing or something. Occasionally I get sporadic messages about old 32 bit apps not being optimized for the OSX, and I'm thinking maybe the OS is searching all drives for these periodically on startup? I guess I'm just reaching. My bigger problem is the OS hanging on shutdown often with no apparent cuprit readily identifiable in the logs. Truthfully this feels like Windows 98 days to me.

Thanks for the update. This is the reason I'm not going to do this. At least for now, sleep and wake is nearly instantaneous. Rebooting on occasional update I'll have to tolerate the 2.5 min process. If Apple doesn't muck up the sleep wake on external SSD then I'll keep motoring along with this bug for now.

It's pretty rank is what is is.

It doesn't feel like the OS searching the drives in startup because the delay is BEFORE the OS starts to boot. It's in firmware territory and there's a big (5-10 minute) delay for booting windows via BootCamp on an external USB as well.

Something is not happy...