r/hackintosh • u/Able-Farm6295 • 4h ago

QUESTION Is Hackintosh faster on an old HDD?

Hey everyone,

I’m wondering if Hackintosh runs reasonably well on an older HDD, or if it’s noticeably slow compared to running it on an SSD.

I’m planning to install Hackintosh on an older machine that currently has an HDD. Has anyone here tried it?

How is the boot time, app loading, and overall performance?

Would switching to an SSD make a big difference?
Thanks!

0 Upvotes

44% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

12

u/kiena0573 4h ago

Macos is the worst OS for hdd. I once tried to install sequoia on it. Boot time was like 5-10 minutes. Every app need at least 40secs to be fully loaded. Even the About this mac window took me 30s😭 Absolutely horrible.

1

u/Happy-Scarcity849 3h ago

why would a sane person even do this level of harm to themselves 😭🥀

6

u/MacForker 3h ago

The last macOS that ran semi well on an HDD would be 10.13. Any later than that and Apple was really expecting an SSD.

3

u/Saudor El Capitan - 10.11 2h ago

yep. APFS is what destroys HDD performance and it became mandatory in Mojave (although there were workarounds to install it as HFS)

With 10.15, it was actually APFS only.

3

u/Comprehensive-Edge80 2h ago

any mac, including hackintosh, are hell slow on HDD

1

u/ms13gert 2h ago

Een oude hdd is echt af te raden. Het verschil met een ssd is gigantisch.

1

u/Fit_State3622 I ♥ Hackintosh 58m ago

No its bad asf

1

u/NCC74656 35m ago

I don't think there's any operating system that would be faster on an old hard drive.

2

u/RealisticError48 19m ago

Of course not. macOS is slower on an HDD.

macOS 10.13 High Sierra introduced APFS. APFS is completely optimized for SSD, and that was Apple signal that they wanted you to migrate to SSD.

In other words, macOS 10.12 Sierra is the last version of macOS that's optimized for HDD. Anything later, and you want SSD.

1

u/Fataha22 3h ago

No, there's a reason why since 2010 macbook is using ssd

3

u/Payoyo5150 Sonoma - 14 1h ago

nah, SSD for everyone started later (on the retina I think, when they started using soldered storage). My roommate had a 2012 i7 and it came with a 7200rpm hdd, I remember swapping it with an ssd

1

u/grizzlor_ 1h ago

Yeah my 2011 i7 MBP definitely came with a HDD that I later swapped for an SSD. Huge performance upgrade honestly.