EtreCheck says that my hard drive appears to be failing

Hello!

Thanks for providing an EtreCheck report! Since you have an iMac with a standard hard disk, you can use an external SSD as your startup disk for improved performance. While this hard disk found in your Mac is perfectly suited to light tasks, such as email and web browsing, but for more advanced tasks, and for users who want the maximum performance from their Mac, this hard drive does have its limitations. Additionally, in your iMac, the hard disk appears to be failing.

Luckily, the SSD will make your Mac 10 to 40 times faster for storage, and in turn, make your entire Mac much faster and even better.

Learn more here: Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community.

Jack

You can run the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately many drive failures will not be detected. You can run DriveDx to check the health of the hard drive. Usually "Warning" or "Failing" notices indicate a worn out or failing hard drive respectively. SSDs are a bit different. Feel free to post the complete DriveDx report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Please try posting the report again. It seems the forum is not allowing me access to the link since it is not showing as a drop down box. When trying to access the link in a separate tab, nothing is loading for me. I've seen this happen several years ago as well to certain attachments. Apple just made some major changes to the forum layout which seems like it may have broken some features again. Hopefully posting a second time will work.

Otherwise try using the "Code Insertion" tool whose icon looks like "<>" as it should preserve the layout of the report better than posting it in the main forum editing window. You may need to first paste the report in the main forum editing window, then highlight all the text of the report and click the "<>" icon to insert the highlighted text into the code block. Hopefully it will look better & be easier to read than in the main window without the Code Block formatting (plus it will likely avoid a character limit as well).

I may not be able to review it until Friday depending on my schedule Thursday.

I was finally able to view the report....had to wait 20 minutes for it to load.

The hard drive appears to be Ok, but there is still a small chance it could have a problem that does not show up in the health report (rare, but it does happen).

The EtreCheck speed check of the drive shows speeds around 50MB/s which is not unusual for a hard drive, yet the EtreCheck report took 14 minutes to complete. The EtreCheck report does have a lot of log files ending in .ips (with .json in the middle of the name). This may be the problem or it may just be another symptom. I don't know what these .ips log files are as they just started appearing with Monterey. The contents may be viewable within the Console app, but I imagine they will not provide much information. The best I can discover is these .ips crash logs are for applications and not macOS itself.

I don't see anything else in the EtreCheck report that would normally cause a problem, but make sure all listed apps in the report are completely up to date. Your macOS is at least one update behind as well. Maybe try disconnecting all external devices in case one of them is causing a problem.

I would run Disk Utility First Aid on the hidden Container so all of the macOS APFS volumes are scanned. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if First Aid says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If any unfixed errors are listed, then run First Aid from recovery mode, otherwise you will need to erase the drive, reinstall macOS, and restore from a backup.

If none of this works, then I would suggest performing a clean install of macOS by first erasing the whole physical drive. I would recommend only restoring the home user folder(s) from a backup and instead re-install all third party apps manually by downloading their most recent versions. If you choose to restore your apps & settings as well from a backup, then you may just bring back the problem which is Ok if you don't mind possibly needing perform another clean install without restoring apps & settings from a backup.

I also recommend testing the clean install before restoring from backup and before installing any third party apps to see how it performs. If it is still slow under these conditions with just macOS installed, then it would indicate a hardware issue, most likely with the hard drive.

That is definitely an option as it will be much faster than the internal hard drive which was never fast anyway.