Here's my EtreCheck - I didn't see a smoking gun, but I've read other threads about the Fusion drive maybe just kinda sucking? I just upgraded the RAM to 40GB thinking easy win, but startup and general app startup/switching just feels too dang slow. Thoughts?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13
Hey there!
That's exactly what's being recommended by padams35. The internal Fusion Drive can, for some users, be slow and deliver poor performance. By using an external SSD, you'll be bypassing it and using a much faster external solution. An external SSD as a startup disk can give your Mac additional performance for system responsiveness, apps, startup, and more.
If you're interested in this solution, this user tip should help: Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community. For capacity of the external SSD, I'd recommend at least 1TB for you since you're already almost using 500GB.
Hope this helps!
-Jack
Hey there!
That's exactly what's being recommended by padams35. The internal Fusion Drive can, for some users, be slow and deliver poor performance. By using an external SSD, you'll be bypassing it and using a much faster external solution. An external SSD as a startup disk can give your Mac additional performance for system responsiveness, apps, startup, and more.
If you're interested in this solution, this user tip should help: Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community. For capacity of the external SSD, I'd recommend at least 1TB for you since you're already almost using 500GB.
Hope this helps!
-Jack
The 1TB Fusion drives only have 32GB SSD (28GB operational). It makes the difference between unusably slow and just somewhat slow-ish.
You will definitely see improved performance if you switch to booting from a large SSD. I'd using an external USB-C SSD rather than worry about upgrading the internal drive.
Probably. I have an external NVME drive in a TB enclosure which is very fast on my 2019 iMac.
Are you saying I should buy an external SSD hard drive and just switch my iMac over to using that as its primary hard drive for MacOS/everything?
iMac 2019 27" Slow (with Ventura, and before really)
