Cleaning Up HD Configuration

Your disk ("HD") configurations are perfectly normal. The difference between the two screenshots you provided is this:

• In the first image you had ** set to Show All Devices
• In the second image you had ** set to Show Only Volumes

Both are normal and you should not try to make any changes to your "HD configuration." And BTW, the Macintosh HD Snapshot is the SSV (Signed System Volume) which is what your Mac actually boots from. None of this is the cause of the slowness you reported.

As suggested by another responder, download & run Etrecheck and post the results here. It is a diagnostic utility written by another member of these forums. It does not report any personal information.

The configuration is not the reason for the slowness. It's probably due to some 3rd party software that has been installed. I have the same configuration:

Download and run Etrecheck. Be sure to give it Full Disk access before running.

Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can evaluate the report to see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

The report doesn't show any of the usual suspects. However, the read and write speed seems low for the low end 5400 rpm drive that you have:

Write speed: 76 MB/s

Read speed: 73 MB/s

It appears that your HDD is beginning to fail. An easy solution is to get an external SSD, clone your boot drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner  and boot and run from the external SSD.

You could increase the boot time by 6.5 x or more depending on the SSD and enclose you get. I get the following with a UBS C adaptor and a bare SSD:

in this type of minimal setup:

With the right enclosure you should get faster read/write speeds. If you're thinking of going that route I suggest to contact OWC's (MacSales.com) Customer Support and see what thetsuggest bases on your Mac model and year, work requirements and budget. OWC is considered the premier 3rd party hardware supplier for Macs by most of the experienced users here.

You can check the health of the hard drive by running the DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper so I can review it.

You can also run Disk Utility First Aid on the hidden Container to verify the file system does not have any issues. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before 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 so, try running First Aid again to see if those errors are ultimately fixed, otherwise you would need to try running First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode. If errors remain unfixed, then they can definitely cause performance issues so if multiple attempts to repair them with First Aid is unsuccessful, then performing a clean install of macOS by first erasing the whole physical drive is the only way to fix those errors.....this destroys all data on the drive so make sure to have a good backup first.

Make sure to disconnect all external devices from the iMac in case one of them is causing a problem.

I have seen some contributors mention that Drop Box and other third party cloud file syncing services can cause performance issues, so maybe temporarily disable Drop Box to see if that helps with performance.

I also see you are a bit behind on the Ventura updates which is now up to 13.6.3.

Make sure all of your third party apps are also up to date with their latest versions as well.

On quick review, the most significant performance issue is your hard drive. At only 5400rpm it's a very slow drive and is the slowest component in an otherwise very good iMac; it is probably the source of your performance issues.

In addition, APFS is not kind to HDD performance due to the way it stores metadata on the drive; the drive ends up doing a lot of seeking, which further slows it down.

Your 2019 iMac with its 3.6GHz processor and 16GB RAM could be a speed demon but you would need an SSD instead of a slow HDD. Replacing the HDD is possible but it is difficult to do..

Very much concur with @ MartinR assessment 👍

Another possible option, to extent the life of this machine, would to run the computer off an External SSD Drive

An article from a follow User can be accessed from this link and related to External Drives as the Startup Disk

Use an external SSD as your startup disk with your iMac or Mac mini