Etrecheck - BIG problems.

makey wrote:

I tried another Etrecheck report having started up from my external F/F drive which is High Sierra and it came up as "Good" instead of "Poor".

I don't know what an "F/F drive" is, but I assume it is some kind of external, mechanical drive.

I think the only reason it's not showing "Excellent" is because of the "Back up Drive is too small" situation.

No. The performance measure is strictly based on how long it takes to run the report. "Good" is about average for booting from an external drive as you did.

I hope this means that, at least, the internal HD is O.K.

It doesn't have any bearing on the internal drive at all.

Too late for what? That drive's not going anywhere. There is no magical test that will proclaim a hard drive to be good. There are numerous tests that will indicate failure. It is unfortunate when a drive fails, but it isn't worth arguing over. You could try erasing it and reinstalling the OS. There is a possibility that such a process will move the data off the bad sectors. But nothing is going to make that drive into a speed demon or reverse its inevitable death. If you want to keep using the machine, get yourself Thunderbolt SSD and enjoy a super-fast machine.

I consider an EtreCheck report with a +10 minute runtime to be evidence of failure. Maybe someone else has some suggestions if you are determined to spend a lot of time on it. Personally, I don't see why people have such attachments to six year-old pieces of obsolete hardware. An SSD is going to give you an immediate 5-fold performance increase.

It's entirely possible the internal drive is going south. Especially if it's the original drive. They don't last forever, and that one would be pretty old by now.

But, you have a LOT of system resource hogging garbage installed. As in, massive hogging.

Two to get rid of immediately, as in, don't even consider keeping them; iSkysoft video downloader and Bresink. First of all, why did they developer think they needed to make these apps kernel extensions? You're directly playing with the operation of the OS when you do that, and a poorly written kernel driver will slow the entire system down.

There are plenty of alternatives to downloading YouTube videos that do not require the use of a kernel extension. And is there really a need for you to know what the temperature of your Mac is? If the system gets too hot, it will take care of itself by ramping up the fans. Or, if it gets really high, shutting down the Mac on its own. There's no benefit for you to run a kernel extension to do nothing but watch a temperature gauge. It's wasted RAM. Nothing else.

Right clicking on Trusteer in the System Preferences only removed the preference pane that shows you the controls with the app. It didn't remove the actual services that belong to Trusteer. You've been told how to properly remove it more than once. Stop trying to blindly tinker and use Trusteer's uninstaller. You may have to download the app again and install it so the uninstaller can work correctly. Uninstaller's will sometimes stop when an item it expects to be able to remove isn't there, and halts.

By far the biggest hog is TechTool Pro. It truly is a useless app. I had it years ago and even upgraded a couple of times before I realized a) I didn't seem to ever use it for anything, and b) it's a tremendous hog. Both with RAM and disk space. I deleted it years ago and haven't missed it at all. If you insist on keeping it, go into the System Preferences and turn off every single automated process it runs. The "backup" isn't a backup in the first place. It takes multi-gigabyte snapshots of your system every single day and stores them on the drive. A backup on the same drive isn't a backup of any kind. If the drive dies, the backups go with it. And with a 1-2 GB backup, it sure isn't the entire drive, so what is it backing up? The app doesn't really say, but it sure takes up a lot of disk space doing "whatever".

It would be best to start your own question for your specific problem. If you have eliminated all possible software conflicts, and it seems you have, then the problem is likely hardware. Replacing the hard drive on an iMac is very difficult. I suggest an external Thunderbolt SSD.

makey wrote:

I've done an Apple Hardware Test (start up with 'D' key held down) and it all passed.

When you say an external Thunderbolt SSD do you mean I should start up on that and then do another Etrecheck Test?

No. I mean you need to start your own question.

makey wrote:

Many thanks.

No. Thank you. I had a number of complaints and questions about the screen captures in EtreCheck 4. People didn't understand why they couldn't take screen captures. I finally just re-enabled them because I got tired of explaining it. Thanks to your post, I will make sure to disable screen captures again in EtreCheck 4.1.4 and just write an FAQ about it.

Please do NOT publicly post screen captures from EtreCheck 4. They may contain personal information.

Hello again makey,

First of all, I want to apologize for telling you to start your own thread. This is your thread. I was just confused.

Hardware tests can only confirm a failure. They cannot guarantee a clean bill of health. They are good when you are having an intermittent failure and want to demonstrate, to Apple, for instance, that the hardware has failed and they should replace it.

There is no explanation for your problems other than a hardware failure. You could try to erase your hard drive and reinstall the operating system. But you have to do that carefully. Often when people are having a software conflict, they will just restore all the same software that caused the problem the first time.

However, in your case, you seem to have already worked though the most likely causes of software problems. I have little confidence that erasing the disk and reinstalling the OS is going to help. I could be wrong. I was wrong about who started this thread. But when it comes to further troubleshooting, who is going to pay the price for being wrong? I think the quickest way for you to get a functional, fast computer again is to start booting from an external thunderbolt SSD. I have high confidence that will work.

There is nothing left in your EtreCheck report that would be causing the Below Average performance. So we have to guess, and the best guess is that your internal boot disk is doing too may retire.

Current SATA disk internal controllers can do 100's of retires (1 full rotation of the platter per retry for a theoretical maximum of 120 per second). The internal controller will NOT tell the operating system that it spent 10 seconds doing retries trying to satisfy your read request. It will just return the data, once it gets a successful read.

Those retries can seriously slow down your iMac's performance.

The Genius Bar does have diagnostics that can read and evaluate the S.M.A.R.T data stored in a SATA disk's internal controller.

You can get 3rd party utilities that will read S.M.A.R.T data (although a bit of arcane magic is needed to interpret the S.M.A.R.T. output.

NOTE: It is a guess that it is your internal disk. But everything posted recently says it is not software, as far as we can see.

BobHarris wrote:

NOTE: It is a guess that it is your internal disk. But everything posted recently says it is not software, as far as we can see.

This is absolutely correct. In this web forum, educated guesses are usually the best we can offer.

Hard drive failures are particularly hard to diagnose. The only guaranteed way to identify a hard drive failure is to replace the drive. If that fixes the problem, then the old hard drive was the problem.

What constitutes a "failure" of a hard drive is a really obscure topic. Your hard drive many not have "failed" per se. But it is obviously getting slower and slower to the point that it is negatively impacting your experience.

I added that SMART report to EtreCheck as a favour to someone who thought it would be helpful. I didn't think it would be very helpful, but that old version of EtreCheck was very limited. For some obscure technical and legal reasons, adding the SMART report was something I could do quickly and easily. But I never claimed that I would ever be able to interpret a SMART report. If other people think they can do that, then I would make the SMART report available.

From what I see, the only reasonable explanation is that your hard drive is slowing down and failing. Some of the work that EtreCheck does is relatively hard on your startup disk drive. That makes it a good, useful test to see how your hard drive is performing in real-world use. You ran multiple EtreCheck reports and they were all over 10 minutes. Any report over 10 minutes is almost always a hardware failure, usually a failing disk drive. It was only when you booted from an external drive that EtreCheck reported a more reasonable runtime of 5 minutes. I just doesn't get any more clear and straightforward than that.

makey wrote:

What do you think about the Apple Hardware Test which says "No Trouble Found".

I think the built-in hardware diagnostic report is weak.

The Genius Bar has better diagnostics. They have the short form they use while you sit there, and they have a long form that requires you to leave your Mac overnight.

If you're already having problems with the drive, a surface scan is only going to hurry its demise. When you do that, the drive reads every single sector that has live data on it to see if it can be reliably read. For free space, it writes data to every sector, then sees if it can be read back.