Monterey slow startup

You actually have an Apple Fusion drive, a small SSD software-linked to a conventional mech hard drive, so your realtime scores are much faster the the 5400 rpm drives alone. Alone the 5400 can do no better than 75-80MB/sec. Your scores are:

Performance:

System Load: 2.04 (1 min ago) 1.86 (5 min ago) 1.80 (15 min ago)

Nominal I/O usage: 0.01 MB/s

File system: 18.87 seconds

Write speed: 346 MB/s

Read speed: 856 MB/s

However, the write speed is slower than nominals. You should see about 500MB/sec write speeds. However, the report does not indicate to me your Fusion system is broken.

No broken but rather interfered with. You have a component of CleanMyMac still loading We know CMM can cause reduced drive speeds reported by EtreCheck. Remove it and rerun the test to see if Write speeds improve.

Finish ridding yourself of CMM and don't install anything like that in the future. Let your Mac be a Mac!

At this point, the external USB-3 SSD option would SLOW your computer. The best that can do is about 400MB/sec for both reads and writes. That is only slightly slower than your current, possible software-crippled Write spec and only half of your current, very normal Read speed.

A USB-2 SSD would be about 10X slower that your current perforamce. The external SSD workaround requires USB-3

Your computer has some problems, please turn Mac OS's security settings back on.

However to address your problem, you have a base model 21.5" iMac with a glacially slow 5400 RPM internal HD. The HD you are using is the bottleneck on the computer's performance. It appears you have a Fusion Drive however I cannot tell if the Fusion Drive has become unfused. You would need to take the computer to your local Apple Authorized Service Provider to have it diagnosed and if the drive is unfused, ask them to re-fuse it. However if the HD is failing then it would need to be replaced. To test if the drive is is failing download the free version of DriveDX and run it. If ANY errors are found that means the drive is failing.

You have some options though, considering the computers age (now almost 8 years old) you may want to consider upgrading to a new 24" iMac, all them are dramatically faster than your current machine.

The second option is to buy an external USB 2 SSD and use that as your startup drive, this will improve the performance quit a bit but you will still be left with a 8 year old machine. If I were in your shoes, I'd seriously consider replacing the computer rather than investing time and money in old technology.

Option 3 is if the HD is failing to pay to have it replaced, this would be very expensive however please let your Apple Authorized Service Provider quote the costs involved.

You've installed some totally unnecessary cleaning app, BuhoCleaner. Uninstall it according to the developer's instructionsl

Also go to the Clean Up section of the report and remove the files indicated there.

Please use the free DriveDx tool to evaluate the health of your internal hard disk and SSD: How to use DriveDx - Apple Community.

Then, please upload both reports here.

Jack

You need to copy the report and paste it into the Add Text field.

Thanks for providing the report for the SSD. Do you have a report for the hard disk?

Jack

Unfortunately, there isn’t a report attached. Rather than dragging the file, copy and paste the contents.

Jack