Possible solution to slow APFS boot..!

[EarlOfClonmell]

I've just tried something on my 10.13.6 Z370 Hackintosh.

I was running HFS+ which booted fairly quickly. I converted to APFS via Disk Utility - Result? Slow boot!

From some googling it seems that if you format the disk initially as APFS all is OK.

So therefore I:
CCC'd my entire boot drive to a different disk. (Inc the EFI folder) Booted off that disk.
Formatted the entire NVME EVO 970 SSD to APFS. Copied the EFI folder back.
CCC'd the whole disk back

Result: Boots as fast as it did with HFS+.

Going to monitor it over the next few days...

 

[EarlOfClonmell]

One reboot down, all good still..!

 

[Kingsonny]

Thats good to hear. Let me know how your testing is going. Also what exactly does ''Boots as fast is it did with HFS+'' mean? I never used HFS+ on this drive. It takes around 5s from bios to Clover and another 25-30s from Clover to OS for me. Would be kind if you could share your time. Ty!

 

[EarlOfClonmell]

I think it was about ~10 sec with HFS from clove to desktop, went up to about 45 seconds after conversion to APFS, now back down under 15.

 

[jleahy2]

Interesting you had this experience. I just got done doing a new install directly to 10.13.6 and went straight to AFS on the exact same NVME EVO 970 SSD drive as you, only to find I was less than impressed with the boot time. I was sitting about 35-40 seconds.

I CCCed everything over to a backup drive, formatted the drive as HFS+, reinstalled clover/efi after copying my system back to the now HFS partition, and boot time is sitting at about 8 seconds, and generally feels more responsive. Kind of sad, as I wanted to keep AFS, but...the difference in boot time is unmistakeable.

I'm tempted to try to go backward one day, but I'm not sure it will fix it. Perhaps?

 

[EarlOfClonmell]

My timings were way off it seems.

Currently 30 seconds from clover to desktop. HFS+ wasn't any quicker.

Need two 970 EVO drives to test one HFS+ and other APFS!

My machine has never booted in 8 seconds even first boot after install! How on earth does yours do that?

 

[jleahy2]

Yeah, having two drives would make for a nice test, but I've only one. I've got another m2 for a dual boot with Windows, but it's not NVME.

I'm not really sure why there's such a difference in boot times between us. My system has been super speedy ever since the conversion, I truly can't complain, not that I shut it down all that often, as it's usually left to sleep. Due to that fact alone, I almost put it back to AFS, but...I can't help but feel the system is a bit snappier overall on HFS. That could, and likely is however, just a placebo effect.

 

[EarlOfClonmell]

Seems something has changed somewhere, getting the APFS slow boot issue again.

More an annoyance than a problem - wish we could fix it as I suspect APFS will become the requirement in the next year or so..!