Also, anytime you first click the top menu bar in an application you run the risk of a beachball.

something seems fundamentally different.įor example, even just opening finder, and navigating to the Applications folder results in sluggish behavior the first time. However, I've been using this computer since 2010 and have never experienced this behavior / speed / delay, etc. I'm not a computer science major but I do understand that when you do something for the first time since a reboot it will need to load new files into the RAM which takes time. This simply never happened in Snow Leopard. But it seems that quite literally everytime you do 'anything' for the first time since the computer has been turned on you run the risk of a spinning beachball and an extended wait. Now granted, once the computer has been on for about 5 minutes, and once you've had an application open for 1-2 minutes, than performance is okay once again. The first time you open an app (Safari, even TextEdit) is far slower than in Snow Leopard. Initial on boot load times seem much slowerĢ. Since installing Mavericks I've noticed two things:ġ. I've been absolutely, 100% thrilled with my MBP's performance / speed since mid 2010. I emphasized 6 consecutive accesses with a thick green line.Long time Snow Leopard user here. The thin grey lines between the small green dots (every dot is one of the 1000 samples) should show the chronological succession of the access time benchmarking test. All other samples show an access time between 7 ms and 30 ms. One sample has an access time of 105 ms and 3 samples of ≈ 90 ms. We see only 4 outliers (marked with red circles) in 1000 samples. The average access time (the time it takes before the drive can actually transfer data from a random track.) is also normal (≈ 17 ms). Read/write rate outermost track: 1260 B/sĪs a result the read rate (blue) and the write rate (pink) slightly decreases from the outermost tracks on the left (≈ 84 MB/s) to the innermost tracks on the right (≈ 45 MB/s). Radius of the innermost track: 1 inch -> track length: 6,3 inches Radius of the outermost track: 2 inches -> track length: 12,6 inches With one rotation of the platter the read/write head can read/write more bits on the outermost track than the innermost track in the same time. Therefore the outermost track contains more bits than the innermost track. Usually the linear density of magnetic areas holding a bit is almost constant on the whole platter. The benchmark shows the normal behavior of a spinning hard drive. The SMART Data shows a normal degradation of an approx. Just to give a correct interpretation of the SMART Data and the benchmark and clear up the misunderstandings revealed in some answers, comments and the question:

Macbook os x mavericks slow to start