Is NAS a solution for a super slow iMac?

I have a twelve month old iMac, running Catalina 10.15.2. I bought it when my 2012 Fusion Drive iMac ground to a halt, the spinning ball of **** dogging my every key stroke. When I migrated everything over, I did not use Time Machine, instead I dragged and dropped everything (which was a massive pain when it came to migrating emails).


It seemed fine for a while but eventually, many tasks, from start up to launching apps, to creating a new email etc, took an unreasonable amount of time. I took it into Apple, to the Genius Bar, where the woman acknowledged that, for a new iMac, it was remarkable slow, even taking into account my transition from Fusion to standard HDD.


She recommended starting from scratch and, again, carefully migrating files over. It seemed to work for a while but, eventually, the SBOH returned. I have disconnected all peripherals and the issue remains.


I have run Malware and Bitdefender. I cleaned up a bunch of things with Bitdefender, or quarantined them, although any thing suspect sat on an external drive.


My music all sits on an external drive, but my photos and vids all sit in Photos on the internal HDD.


Memory does not look to be an issue, but one thing I was wondering is, if I hooked up a NAS and moved things like Photos to it, would that help to speed things up?


One other consideration, I guess, is that I bought a super cheap version of Office 2019 (not subscription based) which I later found out is probably a third-party product, or whatever it's called. It's slow as a Datsun 120Y, but I suspect it's the iMac, not the software.


Any ideas or suggestions are welcome.


I'm really disappointed with this iMac and I've been in the Apple ecosystem since the 80s.


Specs:

iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2019)

Processor: 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3

Memory: 8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4

Graphics: Radeon Pro 555X 2 GB


Disk utility states: 10.87GB used 838.62GB free



iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 3, 2020 5:02 PM

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Posted on Jan 4, 2020 2:39 PM

Well the primary problem is you bought a base model iMac that is intended for only doing e-mail, surfing the Internet and not much else. It is limited by it's hardware which is 8 GB of non upgradeable RAM and a glacially slow 5400 RPM HD. What many people that have similar issues do is to buy and external SSD and then clone their internal HD to the SSD and use the SSD as their boot drive and everyday drive. Once they have done this they re-format the internal HD and use it for additional storage.


Other than that I don't see anything wrong with the system. You may want to restart it (it's been six days) in Safe Mode to clear some caches especially after uninstalling BitDefender and also ensure you re-connect your Time Machine backup External Hard Disk as it's been awhile since it was backed up. However I don't suspect restarting in Safe Mode will make much of a difference but then again it might.


I think your best bet to get really excellent performance is to add an external SSD and that should transform it. If you would like suggestions about hardware and how to do the project we can help on that too.

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23 replies

Jan 4, 2020 2:18 AM in response to Glen Doggett

Yes, I've been doing that and have had CPU usage issues with Firefox, but there's nothing else, particularly, that stands out.


The reason I think memory is okay is that, under disk utility, it shows capacity of 1TB, available 839.9GB (1.32GB purgeable) and 10.87GB used.


Here's a snapshot from Activity Monitor. It seems to contradict the above data in terms of space, but I'm unsure how to read it.


Jan 4, 2020 7:38 AM in response to Anthony Johnsen

Continue to leave it installed and you will continue to have a slow unstable computer. Whoever recommended it either made an error or has no experience with the app. Operating with an AV app does not beneficially augment the Apple security already built into Mac OS, it makes a mess of it.


However it is your computer and your choice what you want to install on it however you will find most experienced users on these forums will agree with my assessment.

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Is NAS a solution for a super slow iMac?

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