When I look under about this Mac in the storage tab -- it says the drive is empty. when I go to utility it says the drive is full. -- The computer is very slow it is having trouble running. Had a very hard time installing High Sierra, kept crashing and getting error message. check out the images to see the story and please any suggestions is appreciated
MacBook Pro, iOS 11.2.6
Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac - Apple Support
How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support
If the issue persists, running Apple Diagnostics may help:
How to use Apple Diagnostics on your Mac - Apple Support
You are looking at two different things. The Apple HDD is a physical drive. Macintosh HD is a logical drive within the Toshiba physical drive. The Toshiba drive is full because all of it is occupied by the Macintosh HD logical drive.
The fact that the computer is slow is unrelated to the way the Toshiba drive is partitioned. See MoonJ's reply for ways to analyze why the computer is slow.
The blue bar for your physical drive isn't saying that it's full. It only reflects the total capacity of the physical drive. What you see under Macintosh HD accurately reflects that you have rather minimal use of your hard drive.
I would say that a solid-state drive would immensely improve the performance. I've got one like yours and even with the original 4GB memory it is absolutely performing better once I got a SanDisk Ultra 3D 512 GB SSD. Some believe that the speed of an SSD can mask problems via brute force speed, but I don't necessarily see that as a problem.
The HDD is by many orders of magnitude the single slowest component in a computer, even a Mac. Replacing it with something less laggardly is always an improvement.
Slow computer and confused about the HD
