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Old 01-05-2006, 12:46 AM
Piggy Piggy is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 9
Unhappy Upgrade from iMac to Quad G5

I have SD2 and was going to use it to switch from an iMac to a Quad G5 but instead just moved the iMac drive to bay 2 of my Quad and set it as the boot drive. The iMac is 1.8 GHz 20" iMac (Rev. A) with 2 GB RAM and the Quad 2.7 GHz with 5 GB RAM. I'm running OS X 10.4.3. The problem I’m having is I'm not seeing the performance jump I expected for simple stuff like logging in after system restart (and the start up applications), launching applications, etc. The system profiler reports 4 CPUs, 5 GB RAM, etc. Memory intensive operations seem quicker but I haven't performed any real tests. The system just doesn't "feel" faster for basic stuff. I realize these may not be CPU intensive tasks but still expected to see a little more livelier system.

The Quad's drive specs are virtually identical: The new boot drive (my iMac's old drive) is a 300 GB Seagate ST3300831AS. (The original iMac drive developed a problem and was replaced with this drive a couple of months ago. I noticed an improvement as this drive is a little faster than the stock Maxtor.) The original Quad drive is a 500 GB Hitachi HDS725050KLA360. The Seagate drive is actually .5 ms faster in seek time if I recall.

I'm thinking the issue is that the lack of performance gain I'm seeing is disk I/O and that the iMac wasn't lacking in power for basic stuff so I will only see the performance gain with applications that can take advantage of the additional CPUs and/or GPU. In other words, the iMac had plenty of horsepower to load applications as fast the disk I/O system could provide the data. Hence, the same basic stuff on the Quad isn't going to be faster because it wasn't a problem on the iMac in the first place and the Quad is relatively the same (even though the bus is faster). Still, I expected the system to "feel" a little faster.

I have, however, tried Virtual PC and it didn't seem to start up much faster - and I definitely expected to see a big improvement with this application. I don't have any timing numbers - again this is just a "feeling" thing.

Could there be an operating system issue? Could there be folders or caches that I need to clear? Could there be drivers that I need? Of course I've run Software Update (it didn't find anything new to install).

I posted a message in the Apple discussion forum and the answer was to put the Seagate drive back into the iMac and perform a migration because drivers might be missing. The system seems to run fine otherwise - every application works, no crashes, hangs, etc. Are missing drivers even a possibility in this case? The answer seems a bit lame to be honest, because if the person that told me this is an expert then why didn't he just tell me to perform an Archive & Install on the Seagate disk (from the Power Mac OS X DVD of course) or install OS X to the Hitachi disk and use the Migration Assistant and access the data on the Seagate disk instead of putting the drive back in the iMac and performing the migration?

I'm posting this issue here because I think someone that truely knows the operating system will be able to tell me "yes, you really could be missing drivers" or "no, that's hogwash, Software Update would have installed any missing drivers assuming the Power Mac didn't run in the first place."

If I really am missing drivers or something there's an issue with cache files, since I have both drives in the Quad should I use SuperDuper to clone the iMac drive to the Hitachi drive and set the Hitachi drive to the boot drive, or should I load OS X on the Hitachi drive, set it as the boot drive and then use the OS X migration assistant to “migrate” from the iMac drive in bay 2 to the Hitachi drive? Other than my *perceived* performance issue, things have been running fine.

Ideas?

Adam

Last edited by Piggy; 01-05-2006 at 04:14 AM.
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