I was recently asked if I could help someone with some old CD Roms. These were from a collection called Art Explosion, which contains Clip Art which works with MS Word.
Initially I tried to read them on an iMac running Mojave (I think) belonging to the requester. It looked as though it was going to take forever to read/copy the CD data into memory. The machine should have been faster than my own iMacs.
There are around 40 CD Roms in the box.
Since then I tried on my own iMacs, and found the following:
Each CD can be read and the data loaded into memory in around 15 minutes using Snow Leopard.
Subsequent copy of the CD data to an SSD connected by USB 2 takes around 1 minute.
However, if the same CDs are loaded into a similar machine running El Capitan, it takes around an hour - perhaps more - to load the data. This is very strange.
I did look into the particular set of discs to see if anyone else had had problems with them. Originally it looks as though they were made for earlier versions of Windows, but then so-called Mac versions were made. Some users reported being unable to load the CDs from around 2010 onwards, or that files were loaded, but then disappeared. However this "evidence" seemed inconclusive.
Some of the data is in now obsolescent formats - such as the clip art files which are in .wmf format, but can be read with some SVG aware programs.
Disregarding that though, why would it take longer to read in a CD using very similar hardware (iMac with side loading CD/DVD drive) in El Capitan than in Snow Leopard?
Initially I tried to read them on an iMac running Mojave (I think) belonging to the requester. It looked as though it was going to take forever to read/copy the CD data into memory. The machine should have been faster than my own iMacs.
There are around 40 CD Roms in the box.
Since then I tried on my own iMacs, and found the following:
Each CD can be read and the data loaded into memory in around 15 minutes using Snow Leopard.
Subsequent copy of the CD data to an SSD connected by USB 2 takes around 1 minute.
However, if the same CDs are loaded into a similar machine running El Capitan, it takes around an hour - perhaps more - to load the data. This is very strange.
I did look into the particular set of discs to see if anyone else had had problems with them. Originally it looks as though they were made for earlier versions of Windows, but then so-called Mac versions were made. Some users reported being unable to load the CDs from around 2010 onwards, or that files were loaded, but then disappeared. However this "evidence" seemed inconclusive.
Some of the data is in now obsolescent formats - such as the clip art files which are in .wmf format, but can be read with some SVG aware programs.
Disregarding that though, why would it take longer to read in a CD using very similar hardware (iMac with side loading CD/DVD drive) in El Capitan than in Snow Leopard?
Comment