History:
I have Intel iMac 5K 2017 (iMac18,3). It has 1 TB Fusion Drive inside. I never reinstalled macOS since I bought it, just upgraded Sierra -> Mojave -> Ventura. Ventura is much slower on Fusion Drive, so I decided to buy a 2 TB external SSD with USB 3.1 type C interface.
It is a pain to reinstall everything, so I proceeded to clone. I logged in Internet Recovery (Option-Command-R), started the Disk Utility, created GUID Partition Table (GPT) and a 1 TB APFS container. Next, I used Disc Utility to restore my Fusion Drive APFS volume to the external SSD volume.
Problem:
I can successfully boot to this migrated SSD volume, but it boots very slowly. After booting, it runs pretty fast, so it shouldn’t be a SSD issue. I measured some timings:
| Fusion Drive |
SSD | |
|---|---|---|
| Boot (to logon screen) | 1:10 | 9:17 |
| Logon | 1:20 | 0:17 |
| Starting Eclipse | 0:44 | 0:17 |
| Starting DBeaver | 0:23 | 0:09 |
| Starting FireFox | 0:29 | 0:08 |
Did anyone experienced something similar? How would you solve this? Maybe there is known method for fixing this? I found advice to disconnect all drives, but I cannot disconnect the internal SDD and HDD. I have a couple ideas to try, but I don’t know which one is better.
- I could restore from Time Machine backup instead of cloning, but I feel it will be the same as cloning.
- I could fresh install new MacOS, and then use migration assistant. Will it migrate everything?
Edit:
SSD model is 2 Tb Samsung 980 Pro NVME inside USB 3.1 Gen 2 external box. Max speed is 10 Gbps (I measured it). I’m fine with it, except boot time.
Edit2:
My journey continues. After fresh install boot time was 0:49, but eventually it returned to 4-6 minutes. Looking at log, I see these lines:
2024-07-14 13:16:03.308610+0700 0x243 Default 0x0 1 0 launchd: [dirs_cleaner:] Doing boot task
2024-07-14 13:18:13.124240+0700 0x258 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (apfs) tx_leave:2401: disk5 tx xid 6920 took 106681145 us to close
2024-07-14 13:18:24.555732+0700 0x34e Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (apfs) tx_flush:803: disk5 tx xid 6921 was closed for 11412983 us waiting to prepare to flush
2024-07-14 13:18:24.556199+0700 0x258 Default 0x0 0 0 kernel: (apfs) tx_enter_internal:2279: disk5 waited 11413078 us to open tx xid 6922 (nx_tx_wait_closed)
I also found this article “macOS Monterey takes 25+ minutes to boot”, so probably I’m not the only one. Meanwhile I will try to live with this, and to save money for better Thunderbolt 3 SSD enclosure box. If things get worse, I always could return back to internal fusion drive.