Mac Pro :: Disk Performance With OS X / Windows - Comparison
Nov 6, 2008
Does anyone have any comparisons of disk performance under OS X and Windows? The reason I ask: I've come to notice that the sound of disks being accessed is very different under the two OS varieties*. So much so, I can recognize the OS in use merely by the sound of the disk! So, I'm led to wonder: which OS on a Mac Pro has better disk read/write speeds?
* - Really rather rough and silly descriptions follow
Windows - snow being crunched underfoot
OS X - a spun coin settling on a table
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Feb 22, 2009
I am a high school senior. Next year I will be going to college and majoring in Computer Science. I am going to purchase a laptop for school, and I'm sure that you can all relate to the fact that there is simply no way that I am going to drop a grand or two on a Dell or Sony; a Macbook or a Macbook Pro is definitely in my future (actually, I've wanted an Apple computer for about five years now).
However, due to the nature of university computer science work, it is inevitable that I will need to run both Windows and Linux to complete research, assignments, and projects. Because I will need to use these two operating systems on a daily basis along with OS X for personal use, I have decided that virtualization, not Boot Camp, is the right option for me. I think I will use VMWare Fusion, but let me know if you think Parallels is much better.
I am trying to decide whether I need/want a Macbook or a Macbook Pro. I have weighed many factors, such as price, portability, expandability, etc., but my question is this: for day-to-day virtualization of Windows and Linux, is a Macbook Pro necessary for acceptable performance, or would a Macbook do almost as well? If Windows XP or Vista or 7 on Parallels or VMWare on a Macbook will drive me nuts with lag, a jittery cursor, etc., then a Macbook Pro would be a justified purchase.
One of the main differentiations between the Macbook and the Macbook Pro is the graphics chipset; it is important to note for this discussion that I have little interest and requirement for working with video games or 3D graphics. I might have to run a few small OpenGL programs here and there for programming exercises, but this will be rare.
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Dec 1, 2009
I just installed a copy of window 7 x64 ultimate on my uMBP 15", 2.66, 4GB ram, 9600 GT.
everything went well using the bootcamp that comes with my snow leopard dvd and also using the bootcamp driver on that dvd too.
anyway i have a few question regarding this.
-after i installed the windows, now everytime i perform disk utillity, verify disk permissions, it takes considerable longer time compared to when the machine is Mac OS only.
previously , after i hit the "verify disk permissions button" it will says straight away like estimated time 28 minutes, then drop to 8 minutes and then to 1 and finaally done.
now after i install window 7 on my mac using boot camp. when i hit the "verify disk permissions" it it says estimated time 1hour 40 minutes !!!
of course it will finissh eventually in less than that , but still it considerably took longer compared to prior window 7 installattion, does anyone experience this as well ?
-the performance benchmark on win 7 ultimate x64 on my mbp is 5.6 score.
is this normal ?
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Apr 8, 2006
Now that Apple has unleashed BootCamp, has anyone run 3D Studio Max on an Intel Mac with Windows? How's its performance?
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Apr 6, 2009
I'm trying to get the best performance out of my vmware, so, what are the best settings i can put (remember I want the closest to bootcamp quality) on my Unibody Macbook pro 2.5 4 gigas RAM.
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Feb 6, 2010
I have a Mac Pro 2009 2.66 quad with ATi3870 and 6 gigs of ram. I used to run a boot camp Win7 RC partition with first Fusion 2 and then 3. It worked fine. Now I bought Win7 Ultimate and I'm getting ****** graphics performance in Fusion. The screen updates slowly. When I move a window there's noticable tearing. Fade effects don't really show fade but a few fading frames of the animation.
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Jul 31, 2010
I just bought a brand new i5 quad core iMac. I installed Starcraft, and I have to crank the settings down in order to get a decent frame rate, so I thought I'd give Bootcamp a go.
I installed Win7 64bit and then installed the drivers from the DVD which came with it. I started up the Starcraft 2 installer and 8 HOURS LATER, it was still at only 60%.
Steam also seems to have issues, it will halt with a "This program is no longer responding" window, and then randomly spring back to life a few seconds later.
The system also feels really sluggish. I've not been able to benchmark anything on it to see if the system is really slow, or if it's just my perception as all the modern games I have are in my steam account.
For some reason when I shutdown, Windows also seems to hang on "Shutting down". It does not exhibit the same behaviour when I launch the boot camp partition through VMWare.
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Nov 23, 2010
Does parallels hurt the running of a Mac?
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Feb 19, 2009
I installed Vista Home Premium on a bootcamp partition. When I load it up in vmware, the graphics really take a fall. Is this normal? I have to use the vista basic theme since it won't let me run aero!
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Dec 29, 2009
Is there a program for the Mac (G3 Tiger) that will perform a hardware performance test like PassMark's for Windows?
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Apr 1, 2010
I'm running W7 ultimate on a Rev. A MBA. I'm looking for some tips on improving performance in Bootcamp.
Here is what I have done so far:
- Installed latest BC drivers (3.1)
- Defragged windows partition
- Disabled hibernate function (to save HDD space)
- Installed all updates from Windows Update
- Disabled (some) of the Aero eye candy
- Disabled unnecessary services (ala Blackviper's site)
- Disabled unnecessary startup programs
EDIT:
- Disabled Index Service
- Disabled Windows Search
My main reason for wanting to do this is that I'm having some issues when playing MP3s in WMP. They play fine until I say, launch Firefox. Doing so causes the playing MP3 to skip, or temporarily become garbled. I assume this is due to taxing the HDD, but since upgrading to an SSD is currently not an option, I'm trying to squeeze as much performance out of the system as I can.
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Apr 19, 2010
iMac, late 2006 Generation
XP info:
System:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service pack 3
Computer:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU
T7400 @ 2.16GHz
2.16GHz, 2.98 GB of RAM
Physical Address Extension
Leopard info:
Version 10.5.8, same hardware.
I've installed XP via Boot Camp. The internal drive in the mac is 230gb (total), and I allocated 60gb to XP. I formatted the partition to NTFS (not quick), and completed the rest of the setup. I then inserted the Leopard DVD and installed the boot camp drivers. Then I downloaded all available updates for XP, and the only other thing I've installed is Mozilla Firefox. I've also made changes to the system using an optimization guide (link below), and the performance seems to be the same before and after.
[URL] - I've only done as far as number 20.
The performance is very sluggish. It shows most while scrolling. It's not smooth and jitters a lot. On previous installations of XP on this computer, I've run audio software (Pro Tools/Cubase) and the performance is terrible. It can't handle even the simplest of tasks.
On the Mac OSX side of the machine, however, performance is fine. Everything runs smoothly.
As far as I know, the specs of the computer are pretty good. I can't understand why performance wouldn't be up to scratch
So, I'm just wondering if anybody has any ideas on what's going on? Is this normal, or am I missing something? It seems like Windows isn't using the full power of the hardware.
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May 31, 2010
I have a 15" 2010 MBP. I got it well spec'd, with 7200 drive, 8 GB ram, best CPU... First thing I did was bootcamp. Went smoothly - did a 400 gb partition for Windows 7. The drivers all installed fine and Windows 7 does alright.
My Windows Experience scores:
Processor: 6.9
RAM: 6.9
Graphic: 6.4
Gaming graphics: 6.4
Hard drive: 5.9
Things look good... But I am having trouble playing hidef content - VLC is choppy on a bunch of files that play smooth as silk when booted into Mac OS - and actually even play ok on my old Santa Rosa 15" MBP. Quicktime is also slow. I have always found VLC to be very solid. (actually use it on the Mac side for this test as well). I tried playing with the hardware acceleration toggle, and it does seem better with it disabled - anyone else having issues playing hidef media on the windows side of this MBP?
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Sep 6, 2010
Considering buying win 7 so i can bootcamp for 1st time. Before I do though, I want to know if/why it'll work. I've read that OSX 10.6 has driver issues witn nVidia hardware. Well, why would they be any different on Windows? Does Microsoft write its own drivers for Mac hardware? Or is it nVidia? I ask this b/c dont you have to install the drivers off the OSX disc? Doesn't make sense why apple would give you better drivers for windows than they do for OSX. Point is, I'd be doing this for gaming. I just don't see why there'd be any performance improvement with the SAME HARDWARE, just running windows instead.
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Mar 23, 2008
1) Can you boot into XP and/or Vista (using bootcamp) from the SATA ports on the system board?
2) What are the transfer rates (input and output) on these ports?
3) Does using these ports in conjuction with a Mac Pro RAID Card affect the transfer rates/latency of the drives connected to the RAID Card?
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Jun 15, 2009
ill installing windows in my mac via bootcamp in anyway affect my mac's performance? ( Is it possible that it will run slower)
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Nov 7, 2009
I am tempted to purchase 2nd hand 13.3" MacBook Pro 2.26GHz, 2gb ram, 160gb hdd.
I have a need to run windows as a virtual machine for some occasional .NET development (which I am studying)
I have a couple of questions
What is the impact of battery life running a VM? I intended to run it in Unity mode and only have open .net tools such as visual web developer.
Also, does anybody know the performance of windows 7 in the new Fusion version? (What's aero like?)
Would the performance of an XP vm be better?
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May 27, 2010
I have bought Macbook pro 13 , 2.4 GHz 2010 model with nVidia 320m graphics, Now my question is that I have installed win 7 on bootcamp and windows experience index scores 5.2 (win aero ) and 6.0 (gaming) , these both scores are same as friends 9400m macbook white, so is it ok ??? or future driver updates may increase these score??
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Oct 9, 2010
I had windows vista installed but suddenly the audio decided to become faulty, after spending a day trying to fix it i realized I have a windows 7 install disc so i might as well just replace vista with windows 7. I didnt take care of vista or ever register it so it became quite a task to upgrade so i just deleted the partition and went to create a new one and just do a full install of windows 7.
I made the partition but the wrong format, so i removed it through boot camp assistant and created another, except now it keeps giving me the "back up the disk and use disk utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using boot camp assistant again" Now, I'd love to do this, except I have no idea what I'm doing and WHY this error has occured. After becoming frustrated I switched from my imac to my macbook pro and received the same error when trying to create a partition. So any help on exactly what I need to do would be a HUGE help. I only use windows for music production (I know, seems backwards, but I use Sony Acid and FL Studio so I'm stuck with Windows)
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Apr 30, 2009
I am having an issue Partitioning my Internal HDD because some files cannot be moved it was able to Partition a while back when Installed Vista but I deleted that Partition as I needed a bigger one for Windows 7 Beta It says I need to "Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume." does that mean I have to reformat my entire HDD? as I don't want to do that.
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May 26, 2009
I'm currently in the process of trying to install Win7 on my Macbook Pro (purchased July '07) using an ISO burned to a DVD with Disk Utility. Unfortunately, the DVD isn't bootable, and while the symptoms match what's in this blog post, the author's solution involved using a Windows-only program.
I'd like to know if it's possible to re-burn the ISO without the version number in the filenames as in the original solution, but with Disk Utility or something else that a Mac can use.
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Nov 2, 2010
so i got this message "Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again." what do I do
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Jun 12, 2009
I have used bootcamp to partition my disk and install windows vista onto my uMB. Now I want to partition the disk again to create a tri boot setup where I can either install ubuntu or the dev preview of snow leopard (I haven't decided yet). Can I just do this with disk utility and shrink my OS X partition in order to create a new partition or will this cause problems with the disk? I would really like to not do a fresh install of OS X because I have had to do this twice to fix disk problems relating to bootcamp.
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Sep 19, 2010
I just bought a new Mac Pro 6-core and an OWC 120Gb SSD drive. My question is putting the SSD on optical drive bay or Hard disk drive bay, is there any difference in performance? My understanding from my old PC is never to share the SATA cable with the optical drive as it will take the transfer speed of the optical drive, because they are running in the same "channel"?Is the 2 SATA cable in the optical drive bay 2 separate distinct ports/channel?
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Jan 3, 2011
I have a macpro with OSX on one drive and windows 7 on a partition of another drive. Both systems work fine and I boot into windows by holding the option key down. What is odd is if I go to the system preferences startup disk my windows install does not show up. I did move my windows partition a while ago to a new drive. I used bootcamp to create the partition and winclone to move the data. It's not a big deal not having the option in the preference pain but would be nice. If I am in windows and go to the bootcamp control panel both OS X and Windows are there.
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Feb 7, 2009
so i have a windows XP professional disk, SP2 and all. i am trying to install windows, i get as far as partitioning the disk, but once it says "please insert XP disk" i do that, and it will think for a few minutes, and make a loud noise [coming from the mac] then a message pops up and says 'please insert installation disk.' the disk is brand new, what am i doing wrong? should i be partitioning the windows side larger?
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Sep 4, 2010
I want to clean install windows 7 after formatting disk. This doesn't sound like a great idea, but I need this for couple of engineering softwares to work. I don't want to spend my nights in computer cluster or at friends pc...
I have heard, I will encounter following issues:
- battery will drain faster
- graphics driver for x64-bit version
- camera
- iPhone backups and syncs (music, video, cal, contacts and apps)
- I would need a external mouse for right click.
I can live with all of the above problems except graphics card drivers. Can anyone provide feedback or useful links they have refered to installing Windows 7?
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Oct 22, 2009
Is it possible to install Windows 7 on an internal disk via Boot Camp and then remove this disk and use it as an external drive? I have two drives for my mini, one in use and one in an external case; unfortunately, neither have room for everything plus Windows. If the answer to this question is no, then I'll buy a bigger drive. I'd just like to avoid this if possible (I already have a ton of external drives and not enough ports to plug them into).
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Jun 1, 2010
I have a 2010 15" MacBook Pro 2.4 i5 that I am trying to install Windows 7 on using BootCamp. I have installed a partition using BootCamp of 45GB but once it prompts me to insert the Windows disk, I insert it but after a few seconds the machine ejects the disk without ever mounting or seemingly recognizing the disk.
I am trying to install Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit from a disk.
Can anyone offer any insight or help me figure out what the problem is? I have already tried rebooting and that doesn't work.
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Oct 21, 2010
How do these 2 versions compare in terms of graphics and real-world usage?
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