iMac 27" 2020 slow SSD

If this is the slow drive:

disk2 - USB DISK 2.0 7.74 GB

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

disk2s1 - S***M (MS-DOS FAT32) 7.74 GB (2.22 GB used)

If so, then "there's your problem!"

It is USB 2 at 480Mb/sec USB 3 is 5000 MB/sec—10X faster. When I back up wife's rather full iPad 128GB to a USB-2 device, it takes 70 minutes; whenI back it up to a USB-3 device, it takes, yes, 7 minutes. IHMO, your iMac is running. Consider retiring that drive if you need speed.

I am as concerned as others about restarting on a schedule but, realistically, I've found that the metric that is affected by not restarting for a long time, Swap Used, ceases to be much of an issue once you get to about 16GB RAM, which my iMac 5k 2017. You have 64GB.

Although I believe that no client-side VPN is worth a drop of snail snot, I see your iMac running on the nominals.

As for the report, you have a lot of extra stuff but they do not seem to be affecting performance at this time. The high CPU use flags for processes starting with "md" can be improved. "md" processes are part of Spotlight indexing. You can use Settings > Spotlight to edit out some things that don't need indexing. See:

Change Siri & Spotlight settings on Mac - Apple Support

Example: I do not have Spotlight index my emails because the search function in Apple Mail does a fine job. I do not need a pile of retained emails loading up Spotlight's task list. Same with Contacts; easir to search with and app the is open most of the time.

Likewise, does one really need Spotlight to find apps that I know are in the Applications folder. Or fonts?

Anyway, hang the old USB 2 thumb drive on the wall with a "Lest We Forget" tag on it!

Allan Jones wrote:

If this is the slow drive:

disk2 - USB DISK 2.0 7.74 GB

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

disk2s1 - S***M (MS-DOS FAT32) 7.74 GB (2.22 GB used)

If so, then "there's your problem!"

It is USB 2 at 480Mb/sec USB 3 is 5000 MB/sec—10X faster. When I back up wife's rather full iPad 128GB to a USB-2 device, it takes 70 minutes; whenI back it up to a USB-3 device, it takes, yes, 7 minutes. IHMO, your iMac is running. Consider retiring that drive if you need speed.

FYI, even most USB sticks marked as USB3 are extremely slow as well at least when writing data. There are some faster ones which will write at maybe 100MB/s, and even fewer which can write at about 400MB/s. Of course you must pay up for the increased write performance. People must be extremely careful to look at the write speed of a USB stick since most will be heavily advertised by their read speeds. If a write speed is not clearly identified for a USB stick, assume it is painfully slow since that would be a key selling point to advertise if it had fast writes. I believe SanDisk makes one model of USB stick with write speeds of 400MB/s, and a couple others with about 100MB/s writes. Don't know about the other brands.

Which of your external drives are you trying to copy files to?

How is it formatted? What size is it and how much free space is there?

How big is the file you're trying to copy?

You have 2 VPN apps installed and another one downloaded. Unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's, school's or bank's servers, they provide false security from a privacy standpoint.  Read these two articles: Public VPN's are anything but private and Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites. 

Unless they are required by a bank, employer or school uninstall them according to the developer's instructions.

You should reboot your Mac more frequently, like every other day or two. Mine only takes about 30 seconds to boot so it's not an inconvenience. Rebooting clears out temporary system and application cache and swap files. If these get damaged or corrupted then can use problems for the system or apps.

You don't have Time Machine enabled. Do you have a backup strategy in place? If not that should be your first priority.

OK, you're sending a file I/8 the size of the flash drive or card to the card or drive. To me that's a recipe for slooooooow transfers speeds. And that's not a Mac problem, that's a device problem ... characteristic really.

Bid00f wrote:

It's a 2GB file to a 16GB-capacity USB. It took like 10-15 minutes.

That sounds like a flash drive and no wonder it's slow. They are known to be slow and unreliable.

How big is the file?

We have a pair of mid tier 2020 27" iMacs and they are as speedy as I'd expect for different size files. For instance, a 16GB VM takes about 2 minutes. That's from an SSD to an SSD.