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Comment by kiwijamo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is why recent versions of macOS performs so poorly on old HDD-based MacBooks. The difference between my work's 2012 MacBook (HDD) and my personal 2015 (SSD) MacBook is like night and day. Most apps open in a second on my SSD MacBook yet take up to a minute to open on my employer's HDD MacBook. It's not just this MacBook, I also see the same on a work iMac as well. Such a shame as these older machines previously didn't run so slowly.

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Replacing an HDD with an SSD really is a night-and-day kind of difference for any laptop I've ever seen, regardless of the OS or filesystem.

IMO, that's likely to be a much bigger factor than the filesystem.

Maybe it's analoguous to the old adage "what intel giveth microsoft taketh away". As soon as a critical mass has SSDs, no one cares to test regressions with spinning disk systems...

Actually, bad I/O patterns are still bad with SSDs. They're just less bad. So, while a HDD user maybe has to wait a week for your app to do its thing, the SSD user may only need to wait an hour or two. But if you bothered to do things the right way, either could be done in a few minutes.

One of the large World of Tanks (online game) patches last year turned 10 second map load times into full minute wait for HDD owners ;-) SSD users didnt notice a thing. Some idiot with dev workstation (xeon, high xx GB ram, NVMe storage) decided to rearrange data structures in files loaded every game round, and nobody has time for testing apparently.

Unfortunately not the biggest one though. I too have a old 2012 macbook pro with hdd. While it was flying under snow leopard it now grinds to a halt every time i open any app or document. Already ordered an ssd but still dreaming of downgrading it back to snow leopard.

Microsoft Windows used to be notorious for slowing down over time. A fresh OS install would restore performance. Many would recommend doing a fresh Windows install yearly to maintain performance.

I have a late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina with a SSD and unfortunately notice the same decreased performance over time with macOS. A fresh OS install breaths new life into the machine.

When you get your SSD do a fresh OS install instead of restoring the complete HD to the SSD.

Or just clean out your random LoginItems and kexts and whatever now and then. Check Activity Monitor and uninstall anything running that you don’t need.

Could be that the rewritten areas for the OS are showing some wear, requiring multiple reads.

Cause and effect is ambiguous because it is so transparent, one doesn’t know what interrupts where are taking the most time.

Might also be that newer versions of macOS need more RAM than Snow Leopard and therefore less is available for filesystem caches.

This might be a factor although IIRC there has been some work after Lion (Mavericks?) where OS RAM usage went down significantly. It was really noticeable on 2GB VMs.

Mavericks introduced compressed memory, so that may be the improvement you’re talking about.

2015 was the year that Apple moved to NVMe SSDs, so they are bound to feel much more snappy than spinning rust disks, regardless of the file system involved.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9136/the-2015-macbook-review/...

Except for their desktops models, the base models of even the 5K iMac still ship with a Fusion Drive, and we only just got support for APFS on those configurations with macOS 10.14. As the base models are typically all authorized Apple Resellers and pop up stores get they must sell a bunch of those especially in regions where there aren’t a lot of Apple Stores (and where people don’t want to pay full price for a year old system).

They are going to need to support and perform well on non-SSD systems for quite a while.

APFS is still (afaik) only used on SSDs. So your HD boot volume is probably HFS even on Mojave.

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