Slightly off topic, I have upgraded VMFusion religiously, and every release they promise ‘much faster than before’
But its become excruciatingly slow, even on a newer MB and 8Gb RAM where I used to have 4.
[quote=114460:@Jeff Tullin]Slightly off topic, I have upgraded VMFusion religiously, and every release they promise ‘much faster than before’
But its become excruciatingly slow, even on a newer MB and 8Gb RAM where I used to have 4.[/quote]
That’s why I stpped upgrading 
[quote=114460:@Jeff Tullin]Slightly off topic, I have upgraded VMFusion religiously, and every release they promise ‘much faster than before’
But its become excruciatingly slow, even on a newer MB and 8Gb RAM where I used to have 4.[/quote]
Interesting, my experience has been the opposite - with each new mac, and each new version of Fusion, it’s faster and faster. You are using a SSD, yes?
I am.
I’ll be honest: I invested in an SSD because people were raving about the speed increase, but … yawn…
Maybe I’m too picky but the only thing that visibly improved for me was boot times.
Ive fiddled about with the VMFusion settings today.
Despite what it says about not allocating to much memory to the VM, it was set to a little over 1Gb, now its 2
I have a dual core so I allow the VM one core.
Ive also today added some ‘secret settings’ to the VMX file
Its a little better now.
But I feel sure it was zippier on my old white macbook VMFusion 4 on Snow leopard.
[quote=114563:@Jeff Tullin]I am.
I’ll be honest: I invested in an SSD because people were raving about the speed increase, but … yawn…
Maybe I’m too picky but the only thing that visibly improved for me was boot times…[/quote]
The speed increase you get depends on many factors. Mine was dramatic,.
For example many people put an SSD into a laptop instead of the optical drive. In many older laptops the optical drive is on a slower SATA bus with 1.5 Gbit/sec = 187 MB/sec peak performance which is nowhere near enough to use the throughput an SSD can achieve (usually 400-500 MB/sec).
In my MBP the optical drive was on a 3 GB/sec bus. Better but still not sufficient. The hard disk is on a 6 GB/sec bus - however moving the hard disk to the optical slot means it looses things like accelerator protection(?) etc.
Ahh, there’s your problem, I suspect. Do you have a Core 2 Duo processor? Those are fast, but the newer ones such as Core i7 are much much faster, even though the GHz speed is about the same.
When I upgraded from a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo to a 2.3 GHz Core i7, I was not expecting much speed increase, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
[quote=114563:@Jeff Tullin]I am.
I’ll be honest: I invested in an SSD because people were raving about the speed increase, but … yawn…
Maybe I’m too picky but the only thing that visibly improved for me was boot times.
[/quote]
IF you have tons of RAM and do very little swapping to disk you mostly won’t notice the SSD
However IF you do a lot of swapping you will
On my machine Page Ins & Page Outs are often low - I have 16Gb RAM
[quote=114742:@Norman Palardy]IF you have tons of RAM and do very little swapping to disk you mostly won’t notice the SSD
However IF you do a lot of swapping you will
On my machine Page Ins & Page Outs are often low - I have 16Gb RAM[/quote]
the other time you will see the difference between a HD and SSD is application load times. And boot times.
i dont ever sleep a mac any more. they all boot faster from power off to functional on ssd than unsleeping them.
personally (and this is from a storage guy), I would max ram before getting an SSD but both doesnt hurt.
Just want to report, I bought a 500 GB Samsung external SSD drive to attach to my Mid 2011 iMac, 2.5 GHz with 8 Gb RAM. The El Capitan disk utility is incapable (yet) to do restore, so I had to use an external Snow Leo system to use its disk utility to clone my internal drive. It took nine hours !
Now I booted on the Samsung, and am amazed. I thought there would be a gain essentially for loading and saving, but it appears to boost everything. Why did I not do that before ?
That’s what everybody asks themselves afterwards
How did you attach it?
Btw my old 24in iMac with a 2.8 GHz Core2Duo and 4 GB of RAM (the max possible)
Snow Leo: VERY FAST
Lion: slow
Mountain Lion: very slow
Mavericks: Molasse, nearly unusable due to frequent SPODs
Yosemite: fast
El Capitan beta 3: very slow, nearly unusable due to frequent SPODs
USB.
For your model that’s USB2 at 480 MBit/sec max = 60 MB/sec which is barely faster than the internal hard disk and nowhere near what the SSD can do (550 MB/sec).
I would suggest to measure the speed of your harddisk and SSD with a utility like this one:
Something seems wonky with your internal harddisk.
You need to be very careful with Samsung SSDs, there is two types: Cheap and Expensive. The expensive ones come highly recommended, the best of the best. The cheaper ones are absolute ■■■■ and expire at the same time the warranty does.
When testing stuff like this, don’t forget to run DiskWarrior to defrag the directory catalog and do an SMC reset. These two things can have a significant impact on disk performance and thus the overall feel of the performance of the machine.
My wife’s 2014 MacBook Air with 4gb of RAM and 128GB SSD is the same with El Capitan, I see a lot of spinning beachball and when I checked the memory usage in Activity monitor it was using nearly 4gb of VM. Thats just after booting the OS, with hundreds of little apps all running.
Finder and Safari were the biggest offenders. I’d love to see a return to Snow Leopard memory usage and getting rid of some of these helper apps.
It’s a lot smoother on a 2009 MBP with a spinning HDD, but 8GB of RAM.
Umm, no. Defrag is completely unnecessary with modern OS X versions (at least as far back as Snow Leo; OS X does an excellent job in cleaning up and looking after itself), and while an SMC reset can fix problems with a computer running slow it has nothing to do with SSDs per se.
As for El Capitan running slow: there is still a LOT of control code in there that is going to be stripped out before release, so I’m not too worried.
[quote=204744:@Markus Winter]For your model that’s USB2 at 480 MBit/sec max = 60 MB/sec which is barely faster than the internal hard disk and nowhere near what the SSD can do (550 MB/sec).
I would suggest to measure the speed of your harddisk and SSD with a utility like this one:
Something seems wonky with your internal harddisk.[/quote]
Actually, with BlackMagic the external SSD comes out faster than you predicted.
Read Write
Internal 68 MB/s 68 MB/s
SSD USB 23 MB/s 30 MB/s
OK. I went external as a first step to verify the actual improvement. If I can boost my now aging iMac and not buy a new one, I have an excuse to buy a new MBP
Now, the question is : what is the reference I should be looking into for an internal SSD I will install myself ?
According to this page below, the best one is the Samsung 840
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/best-mac-ssd-6-solid-state-drives-reviewed-and-rated-1168844
Any experiences to report ?
I have an 840 (500GB) on a Windows desktop PC, and its successor, the 850 on other PC’s, in 120, 250 and 500 GB versions. I would go with the 850, which is a bit faster and supposedly longer lasting. But my 840, already a couple years old, is still going strong and performs just as well as the day I installed it.
Thanks.