But does boot time fully capture the effect of drive performance? I.e., if the boot times for your internal and external drives are the same, will all other operations that involve the SSD during routine operation also be identically responsive?
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Those with 2020 M1 Mac Minis...
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It's also a protection mechanism. If anything were to happen to the M1 Mac Mini, my data (the important thing) is on the external. So I just replace the computer. I know that if I were looking for a used M1 Mac Mini computer and someone told me the internal SSD were basically brand new, virtually unused (with proof), that would be a selling point in my book. It means at least one part of the computer, which cannot be replaced/upgraded, is basically as new as it was when the computer was first purchased. Maybe it's just me, but I plan to use that as a selling point. Plus the fact it's a 16/512 model should help boost it's resale value... at least a little. 😁 But my M1 Mac Mini is still more powerful than anything I use it for, so I really don't have a NEED to upgrade. I'd be doing it, just to be doing it (which can be fun, if you have the money to do so).
In my amount of usage, everything else seems just as fast and responsive. I'm just trying to figure out why I hear the Jeopardy theme everytime I boot it, now. That's really the only difference I'm noticing and I want to know why.
It's not a protection mechanism to have the data on the external instead of on the Mini. Either way, you have no backup! You'd only be protected if you had a complete copy of your data on both.
Plus your external is just as likely (probably even more likely) to fail than the Mac Mini. I've had a couple of externals fail. I've had Macs that needed repair, but never had one that failed completely (such that I couldn't get the data out).
At the very least, you really need a complete duplicate of your primary, on an entirely separate drive, as backup. If you had that, you wouldn't have to worry about your primary drive (whether it's on the Mini or an external) failing, since you'd have that duplicate.
But what you really need is a complete backup system. That would typically mean having:
(1) The data on the primary drive
(2) A separate drive, attached to the Mini, that contains a complete backup copy of the primary drive, and that automatically updates nightly (I'd recommend Carbon Copy Cloner).
(3) A remote backup copy of the primary drive (local backups don't protect you from fire or theft). The remote backup could be in the cloud. But I personally don't like using the cloud because, while it's quick to update with new files, it could take forever if you ever need to retrieve the entire contents of your drive (which, in my case, is >1 TB); plus can you reliably transfer 1 TB without interruption over an internet connection? Thus I instead have a couple of cheap portable HDD's for that, where one is always kept in a safe deposit box. When I want to update the remote backup, I swap them out.
(4) Optional: A Time Machine drive that continuously backs up your primary. This is not a true backup—Time Machine is too complex to be robust enough for that (I've had Time Machine volumes get corrupted several times, forcing me to wipe them; I've never had that with my Carbon Copy Cloner volumes)—but does offer a great interface for versioning (finding older versions of current files, or older versions of files you've accidentally deleted).
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I don't think Apple purposely slows down software on newer systems. This has always been a thing for computers. Newer systems require more power because of their new features
The only time this was ever not the case was for the earlier releases of Mac OS X and that's because it was so painfully slow at first and took a long time to optimize
Anyway, I haven't noticed much slowdown. The biggest bottleneck would be if you chose the low RAM and SSD versions which will slow down a lot faster than the ones with at least 16GB RAM
The only time this was ever not the case was for the earlier releases of Mac OS X and that's because it was so painfully slow at first and took a long time to optimize
Anyway, I haven't noticed much slowdown. The biggest bottleneck would be if you chose the low RAM and SSD versions which will slow down a lot faster than the ones with at least 16GB RAM
It may be your work flow. For me it is only "slower" than other apps when it's a big app like Xcode, Final Cut Pro, or a game such as RE4 Remake. These are all considerably resource intensive apps. In the case of those apps, I have seen some slowdown to an extent, but everything else pretty much still flies, it doesn't feel as fast as it did before, but I also think that is just me getting used to just how fast it is.
Very few spinning beachballs, or more than one bounce when launching apps, the three aforementioned is where I'd see it the most. I have noticed that Apple Music bugs out for me sometimes...but I just recently started using it again and this is probably just a problem with the app and/or my internet connection.
Very few spinning beachballs, or more than one bounce when launching apps, the three aforementioned is where I'd see it the most. I have noticed that Apple Music bugs out for me sometimes...but I just recently started using it again and this is probably just a problem with the app and/or my internet connection.
Installing an older OS also installs its firmware.
I think I'm not communicating just how completely paired the OS and firmware are in Apple Silicon devices, both macOS and iOS. Firmware is part of the signed "kernel collection", which is all the assets required by Apple's last stage bootloader. Other parts of the kernel collection include the XNU kernel and all its kernel extensions. If any part of the whole collection isn't available, or has the wrong signature, no boot.
The upgrade process may remove old firmware, but not by immediately overwriting. If you poke around in the directory structure of the Preboot volume you'll find that firmware is hidden behind directory names which are obviously unique IDs of some kind, encoded as hex strings. Presumably each macOS release gets its own UUID. This ties into how Apple's upgrade process rolls back to the previous OS if the upgrade fails partway through; old firmware can hang around until the new OS version has successfully booted and run a post-upgrade cleanup script.
As for the 2019 iMac, like all non-T2 Intel Macs, its firmware is a UEFI image stored in a NOR flash chip on the Mac's motherboard. There are supposed to be stable interfaces between UEFI and OS, defined mostly by companies other than Apple (UEFI is a PC industry standard), so you should be able to upgrade the UEFI without harming compatibility with old OS versions.
(There is actually a small amount of non-paired firmware on Apple Silicon Macs. Like UEFI, it lives in NOR flash and is supposed to have stable interfaces. Unlike UEFI, it's incredibly tiny and feature-poor, so the chances of its interfaces ever breaking by accident are smaller.)
Now, I see. You are right in the sense of a rigorous test. The highest R/W Speed from an external drive we can get through Thunderbolt 3 is around 2800 mb/s, very close to the performance of an internal drive for a Mac mini of 512 GB.
The ram of OP's Mac is 16gb. If no swap happens, the performance should not be quite different between booting from an external drive and booting from an internal drive. However, if there are swaps, there should be some difference here because booting from the internal drive can largely benefit from the advantages of unified memory.
It's understandable...
iOS 7 caused iPhone 4 slow/poor performance
iOS 9 caused iPhone 4s and iPad 2 and iPad 3 slow/poor performance
I have 15" MacBook Pro 2015 that even though it can be upgraded to Monterey, I decided to stick with Catalina...
iOS 7 caused iPhone 4 slow/poor performance
iOS 9 caused iPhone 4s and iPad 2 and iPad 3 slow/poor performance
I have 15" MacBook Pro 2015 that even though it can be upgraded to Monterey, I decided to stick with Catalina...
Got it—thanks for the added clarification! Let me attempt to summarize my new understanding. I've added my questions in bold italics.
I. Apple Silicon Macs
With a minor exception*, there is obligate pairing between the OS and its firmware, such that each OS can only run on its own specific firmware. Thus if you upgrade an existing installation to a new OS, and then downgrade, you know the firmware will upgrade and then downgrade along with it. It has to be this way, since otherwise any changed OS would not run. Thus the method used to downgrade (whether it's via DFU or an external boot drive) is irrelevant.
*The minor exception is the small amount of firmware on the NOR flash, which will be upgraded when you upgrade to the new OS, but will not downgrade if you go back to the original OS, regardless of how you do the downgrade [even if you use DFU (?)]. [You will lose the original OS's firmware (referring to the small amount stored on the NOR flash) even if you add a second OS instead of upgrading the current one, because there's no provision for storing the firmware from multiple OS's here. (?)]. But because this firmware has such limited functionality, it should work without issue across multiple OS's.
II. Intel Macs without T2
All (or at least nearly all) the OS's firmware is stored on the NOR flash chip, and will upgrade when you upgrade, but won't downgrade when you downgrade. [You will lose the original OS's firmware (referring to the small amount stored on the NOR flash) even if you add a second OS instead of upgrading the current one, because there's no provision for storing the firmware from multiple OS's here. (?)] Since it's known these Macs can be readily upgraded and downgraded by the user (via Internet Recovery), the firmware for all OS's subsequent to the one with which the Mac was shipped is designed to be backward-compatible with all OS's back to the original one. If it weren't, the Mac would break when someone did an Internet Recovery to restore the original OS.
III. Intel Macs with T2
????
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We are not discussing iOS here. But yes, old hardware can have a hard time running new OS versions that have been optimized for newer hardware. Most often correlated with older, lesser amounts of RAM. Just FYI my 2016 MBP thrives on Monterey, except that modern apps usage demands more RAM than 16 GB. I suspect that Catalina would be worse, not better than Monterey is.
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You observe a speed loss, but you have presented no valid reason to blame the OS version. IMO your "mindset that Apple will make older hardware slowly run slower with successive macOS upgrades, insuring the "need" to buy new hardware" has zero validity. Of course new OS/apps versions run faster on new hardware and more modern (i.e. more) RAM amounts; that has been the case for 40 years of Macs. Tech constantly advances, a good thing.
We do not doubt your observed performance slowdown. A friend had a very similar boot issue that I resolved, but I do not recall the exact solution. However I do remember that my troubleshooting involved opening her Activity Monitor app and scrolling slowly through everything, looking for anomalies. I found a process with a huge, obviously anomalous amount of memory usage IIRC. When I looked up the process with Apple Tech it showed a known problem (constantly looking for Siri queries IIRC) and a solution. Easily fixed, fast booting immediately restored.
So I suggest that you try the troubleshooting that worked once for me. Slowly peruse every line item in Activity Monitor and see if anything seems anomalous, and further research any anomalies. Good luck.
I think I need to clarify... I have not yet installed Sonoma (I'm still running Monterey 12.7) and I'm asking if anyone has noticed a speed loss on their 2020 M1 Mac Mini (16/512 configuration) after installing Sonoma. From the responses, I get the impression no noticeable difference has been noted, but I was trying to get a head's up, just in case. I'm currently happy with Monterey (except for the much lengthier boot (about 20+ sec.) on my 500Gb WD My Passport drive); it booted just as fast as the internal when I first installed Big Sur 11.1 but I noticed the boot was noticeably slower sometime after Monterey (I think it may have been sometime between 12.6->12.7, but not certain), so no NEED to install Sonoma, but new macOS's are always tempting...
I think it is correct that there's only one copy of firmware stored in NOR flash.
What's in NOR flash is a bootloader plus the minimum amount of firmware required for the bootloader to do its job - for example, the SSD firmware lives here, because the bootloader in NOR flash needs to be able to access the SSD. Apple also stores calibration data in NOR (stuff like the lid angle sensor on MacBooks, color calibration data for built-in displays, trackpad calibration, etc).
Same thing, only one firmware image.
This is where things get weird.
The T2 chip is a full Apple SoC with RAM and CPUs and so forth. It boots with the same process as iOS, and runs bridgeOS, a super cut down version of iOS. By the time macOS is started on the x86 CPU, the T2 has more or less downgraded its own role to just being a fancy SSD controller and the place where the Secure Enclave lives, but early on in the boot process, it's completely in charge.
The x86 processor still boots UEFI firmware, and from there, macOS. However, while there's a UEFI image in NOR flash, the x86 doesn't start up from it directly. Instead, T2 is tasked with validating the UEFI firmware's signature, copying it to a RAM area the x86 can use, and letting the x86 start from it once everything's all set up.
I have a 2020 Mac mini and I have had hub problems, display problems and restarting problems which all SEEM to have started with more recent OSs. It could just be time and wear and tear. But I'm currently having all sorts of issues, so I say,
If it ain't broke.......
If it ain't broke.......
Monterey was notorious for slow boot times when booting from external drives. There is a good bit of reading about it with a google search. It drove me nuts when I was booting a 2013 21.5" iMac off of an external SSD. I wanted to run Monterey via OCLP to make use of Universal Control at the time. The boot time increase on the SATA III SSD over USB 3.0 drove me nuts, but once it was up and running, all was fine.
On my M1 mini and work issue 13" M1 MBP, neither have been affected performance-wise by recent OS upgrades. On my MBP, I'm sitting with my CPU at 95% idle. We are long past the days where Macs had a single core and upgrading the OS added enough complexity to significantly impact performance. Yes it was a problem until the early 2010s for Macs, and again as the A series chips for iOS devices were ramping up, but even then, after 2016, OS updates had marginal impacts for iOS devices. My original iPhone SE was doing just fine on the latest OS until 2022 when I decided it was time to move on to a 13 mini.
I suspect we are moving into an era, as AI and ML become more important, where the NPU specs are going to be the limitation that leads to a more rapid update cycle over the next 6-10 years for Macs and iOS devices.
Rest assured that jumping to Sonoma is going to have minimal impact on the responsiveness of the system. M1 really raised the bar of what to expect from an entry level Mac.
Also consider doing yourself a favor and use the internal SSD, especially since you spent $200 to upgrade it in the first place. I am not sure why you insist on preserving it for the next user. You might net an extra $25-$50 for the low number of writes on the SSD. Given that the M2 released with a price drop, the resale value of the M1 took a larger hit immediately on the M2 release than you are likely to recoup on resale. It's like buying a brand new car and deciding to swap out the transmission. Sure you can sell the used car with a new transmission, but it is not going to significantly offset the fact that you put 120k miles on the engine in the process.