This is a 2017 21.5" iMac with a 2.3GHz Dual-Core i5 processor running Ventura 13.6.9 OS. It is miserably slow all day every day. Here is the EtreCheckPro report. I see the list of minor issues but am not sure what to do about them or if they are even relevant to the speed issue. Please advise, thank you in advance.
iMac 21.5″, macOS 13.6
First, you should know that your iMac was the slowest machine that Apple offered at the time of purchase: 8 GB RAM and a 5400 rpm HDD.
Acrobat Reader and its supporting files are a real resource hog. I recommend you uninstall it according to the developer's instructions. Then use Preview to view PDFs or the 3rd party Skim app.
It appears that your hard drive is failing:
Write speed: 80 MB/s
Read speed: 73 MB/s
It would be prohibitively expensive to replace the HDD with an SSD inside the case. However, one could get an external SSD, clone your internal boot drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner and boot and run from it.
The most inexpensive option would be a bare OWC SSD connected by an SATA-USB adaptor like this:
This setup gets me read and write speeds of 400-500 MB/s which is 5-6 times the speed you're experiencing now. With the SSD in its own case with appropriate chip you can get speeds 4-5 times the 400-500 MB/s speeds.
If you go that route I recommend contacting OWC (MacSales.com) Customer Support to see which of the many external SSDs they offer would best meet the requirements of you Mac model, workflow and budget.
First, you should know that your iMac was the slowest machine that Apple offered at the time of purchase: 8 GB RAM and a 5400 rpm HDD.
Acrobat Reader and its supporting files are a real resource hog. I recommend you uninstall it according to the developer's instructions. Then use Preview to view PDFs or the 3rd party Skim app.
It appears that your hard drive is failing:
Write speed: 80 MB/s
Read speed: 73 MB/s
It would be prohibitively expensive to replace the HDD with an SSD inside the case. However, one could get an external SSD, clone your internal boot drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner and boot and run from it.
The most inexpensive option would be a bare OWC SSD connected by an SATA-USB adaptor like this:
This setup gets me read and write speeds of 400-500 MB/s which is 5-6 times the speed you're experiencing now. With the SSD in its own case with appropriate chip you can get speeds 4-5 times the 400-500 MB/s speeds.
If you go that route I recommend contacting OWC (MacSales.com) Customer Support to see which of the many external SSDs they offer would best meet the requirements of you Mac model, workflow and budget.
I respectfully a dissenting opinion regarding your drive's health. I have a little database of collected drive performance scores by drive type.
For your drive specs:
disk0 - APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E632 1.00 TB (Mechanical - 5400 RPM)
Internal SATA 3 Gigabit Serial ATA
these speeds:
Performance:
System Load: 1.69 (1 min ago) 1.72 (5 min ago) 1.76 (15 min ago)
Nominal I/O usage: 0.02 MB/s
File system: 43.66 seconds
Write speed: 80 MB/s
Read speed: 73 MB/s
are at the maximum possible for that drive model, but still dreadfully slow with newer macOS versions. Apple used very under-spec 2.5-inch laptop-class drives in un-optioned 21.5-inch iMacs between 2012 and 2019. Your drive was incapable of running faster even when new.
The possible drive health indication I see is in File System. In data collected, I am used to seeing healthy drives at 35 seconds or less but, at 43 seconds, yours is a bit high yet is not really screaming as sick. Like your doctor saying "We'll watch that" when your cholesterol is just a little over. Usually physical health issues in use start to show up when File System score are around the 75 second mark; the test times out at 120 seconds. 120 seconds would be Death's Door. ⚰️
The larger issue is that this is the crippled educational/institutional model made for bulk buyers with limited computing needs.
In addition to less powerful graphics, the big performance drop is due to the processor. Yours has a 2-core laptop-class 2.3gHz processor; the standard consumer model in 2017, the iMac 4K 21.5-inch (US$200 more), had a desktop-class 4-core process running at 3.0gHz.
Benchmark scores for the two 2017 iMacs tell a lot, (from the MacTracker database in the Mac App Store). Your is the one on top:
PS: Adding RAM will not speed up your hard drive. It would be a waste of money.
I absolutely agree with my wise amphibious friend that the external SSD boot drive is the most cost-effective way to get a very noticeable speed boost. My drive performance database shows the cheapest external SSD boot option will give 400MB/sec Reads and Write speeds— 5-6X faster than what you now get. That will elevate your experience with this Mac to surpising levels.
It is cost-effective because the external SSD can still serve as external storage on your next computer. That's high retained value.
Thank you very much, Old Toad. We are using a WD easystore on the iMac in question. Sorry I didn't include that info before... photo attached of its info. Might we not be using it properly? (New employee here, employees who set this up are no longer around.)
That's your Time Machine backup drive. You don't want to sacrifice that drive for a boot drive. You need the Time Machine backup drive to maintain your backups. Get a second external drive for use as a boot drive.
👍
Thank you for your clear explanations, I really appreciate your time and expertise!
I'm very grateful for your time and expertise, Allan, that's very useful information!
Very Slow iMac, ok on free space...
