Slow boot time after update to Mojave - External SSD

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).

"maverick1987" reported in another thread that his Lacie SSD Thunderbold 1TB (STFS1000401) is booting fast. Another user reported various Lacie drives that boot fast.

What model is your Lacie that is slow? Does the slowness appear before or after the Apple logo at startup? Also, when you open System Information, do you see your drive under SATA section with fields like "TRIM Support: Yes/No" and "Medium Type: Solid State"?

I formatted my internal drive with CCC to HFS+ and I am now using Mac OS Mojave 10.14.1 on a HFS+ partition. My experience is, so sadly, that this does not make any difference in booting time. So my conclusion is that this is a problem due to macOS Mojave. Still have no acceptable solution.

yes, exactly - delay appears after the start chime and before the apple logo. (but the screen is white not black : ) ) _fiery thanks for the info!

after reading your answers, guys, i am going to try lacie STEV1000400 enclosure and replace the HD in it with SSD.

at first i thought as it is thunderbolt 1st version (my mac support only version 1) it wont work as needed. but you say it will, i will try

Hy Guys,

I had contact with the helpdesk from Apple and the logt into my Mac so the can figure out what the problem of this is.

Data has be sent to them and the gonna work with it.

So to let you know the are working on it.

For now we have to have patience.

If you have details what can help them let it know here because the also reading this tread.

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.

Hi,

i tested it and it does not help for me. I think what you encountered is the shorter timepspan between startups. If you reboot multiple times, it always somehow gets a little faster. But as soon as you have a power down of at least 24 hours it is back to old speed.

Thx for trying this. I think we will still have to wait for Apple to fix that.

I got a call from Apple Care today too, they screen shared my Mac & made me send the diagnosis report to them. They were very patient & asked for information regarding the SSD brand & the enclosure. I hope i can contribute to this fix for apple but at least they seem to be contacting us for system reports & trying a fix.

Thanks.

Same problem here, Samsung T5, older iMac late 2013. Seems even longer than 5 Minutes sometimes. That's really annoying, in particular, because I just got me the SSD to improve my start-up time ... hmm :-(

Thunderbolt solved another problem in Mojave's bootloader. The problem was that Mojave's Startup Disk Preference Pane can't boot the selected El Capitan drive (put in a USB enclosure). After the restart, instead of El Capitan the Bootcamp Windows started. But if I use eSata to Thunderbolt cable for the very same enclosure and drive, then Mojave (System Preferences > Startup Disk) successfully selects and boots El Capitan.

There is an interesting read on the SuperDuper's Blog, that I was not able to comprehend fully, but It talks about similar problems with APFS and Startup Disk Preferences:

https://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/its_awfully_quie t_out_there/

After trying different methods my start time shrinks to 37 seconds from 4.5 minutes:

My setup:

iMac 2017 21''

Internal Fusion Drive 1Tb

External enclosure over USB-C (Satechi https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Aluminum-Type-C-External-Enclosure/dp/B01FWT2N30/ ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1541591388&sr=8-3…)

Samsung EVO 860 1Tb in the external enclosure

My steps:

1) Disable local time machine: sudo tmutil disable local

2) Disable noatime: via com.hdd.noatime.plist

3) Refresh kext cache: sudo kextcache -system-caches

4) Erase Internal FD

After those steps, my startup time on external SDD is 37 seconds.

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!

@alex-101:

We had similar suggestions a couple of times here. Switch off your Mac and wait 24 hours. Then switch back on and let us know if you're still booting in 37 seconds or if the good old boot delay of 3-4 raises its ugly head again.

@andywynn55:

We had this suggestion numerous times too in this thread. This method is completely unsupported by Apple and thus cannot be considered as a workaround. Mojave is not supposed to run under HFS+, that's why it's not possible to install it without changing to APFS. Who knows what downsides that HFS+ clone method has. Even if everything works fine at the moment, there's a high risk that this might change in the future.

Same problem:

external ssd Samsung T5 1TB connected to the thunderbolt port

Imac 2017 - 3,4 GHz Intel Core i5 - 8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 - Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB

Mojave 10.14 = Boot 4min~

Mojave 10.14.1 = Boot 3min~

this also happens with the internal fusion drive 1TB 😢

I still do not see any definitive solution from Apple...😟

Samsung T5 is a USB 3.1 with a USB-C port (connector looks like Thunderbolt v3, but connection is only USB). See: https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/ portable-ssd-t5-1tb-mu-pa1t0b-am/#specs

Thunderbolt drives are listed under "SATA /SATA Express" section of System Information with these fields:

Medium Type: Solid State

Removable Media: No

TRIM Support: Yes/No

S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified