new mac frequently beachballs

[geb724]

i am a new mac owner with a 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display purchased nov 2019. it has 16mb factory installed ram and a 1tb hdd. the hdd has about 200gb of free space. the other space is mostly data- music, videos and photos.

very often when i click to open a random program i get the beachball. no other programs are running. all i have open is google chrome. last night it started to beachball and i let it run while i went out. 2 hours later it was till running.

i thought by moving to mac from pc these types of issues would not happen.

any reasons as to why this is happening and more importantly what solutions are there?

 

[ruslan120]

The problem is most likely the slow hard drive.

Programs have grown in complexity and have become more demanding on hardware, yet the slow spinner drive has remained stagnant.

Solutions:
- (Easy) Under Settings, under Energy, unselect “Spin down drives whenever possible.” This will keep your disk spinning so you don’t need to wait (and see the beach ball) if you launch a new program. It will still be slow and beach ball, but it will most likely occur less often.
- (Medium) Buy an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD and install MacOS on it. Use it as your main drive and use the 1TB for large data files.
- (Nuclear #1) Sell the computer and get one with a solid state drive.
- (Nuclear #2) Take it into a repair shop and pay them to upgrade it to a solid state drive.

 

[RUGERMAN]

How long ago did you buy it and how far is the nearest Apple store? I'd take it back and have them fix it. I have a 10 year old iMac and it never gives me any problem like that.

 

[geb724]

i bought it brand new from apple.com in November. so it is still under the 1 year warranty. if the problem persists i will definitely take it to the store.

 

[The Hammer]

Have you tried running First Aid?

 

[Fishrrman]

"i am a new mac owner with a 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display purchased nov 2019. it has 16mb factory installed ram and a 1tb hdd. the hdd has about 200gb of free space. the other space is mostly data- music, videos and photos."

(sigh)
It's tough to be the bearer of bad news, but you bought THE WRONG iMac.

(you're shaking your head, "why did he say that"?)
Because... you bought a Mac with a platter-based hard drive inside -- literally the kiss of death for the Mac OS. Too slow.

The "solutions"?
The BEST solution (if you still can) is to RETURN IT and buy one that has an SSD inside. This will SOLVE the beachball and speed problems, hands down.

If you can't return it, then your best option is to buy an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD (like the Samsung t5), plug it in, and set it up to be the boot drive. This is child's play on a Mac (completely different than a PC), and it WILL make the computer MUCH faster and more usable.

 

[RUGERMAN]

Every thing else being equal, no doubt an SSD will be much faster, but like I said before I have a 10 year old iMac with a platter HD and no such problem. I would have Apple at least take a look before I did anything else.

 

[Weaselboy]

last night it started to beachball and i let it run while i went out. 2 hours later it was till running.

This has nothing to do with the fact you have a Fusion drive vs. a pure SSD setup. You have something else going on locking up your system.

A Fusion drive is not as fast launching apps as an SSD, but it nothing like what you are describing.

Has it always done this since new? Can you think of anything you did or installed that brought this on.

What you might try as a test is hold the shift key down at boot time to startup in safe mode. That stops all launch and startup items from running. If that fixes it, it tells you it is some launch or startup item causing this. Give it a try and let us know.

 

[TwoH]

It's running a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, it's going to be disgustingly slow, you should look at an upgrade to an SSD for the 21.5" iMacs.

 

[konqerror]

It's running a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, it's going to be disgustingly slow, you should look at an upgrade to an SSD for the 21.5" iMacs.

2.5s are actually faster at launching programs than 3.5s. Less distance to move the heads generally win in random seeks, even when considering slower rotational speed.

 

[oldmacs]

It's running a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, it's going to be disgustingly slow, you should look at an upgrade to an SSD for the 21.5" iMacs.

I second this. Apple should have made SATA SSDs standard like 4-5 years ago, with the faster SSDs for the higher end models.

Am working on a client's 2017 base model iMac and its ridiculously slow. Apple greed to the max.

 

[JustMartin]

My advice would be to listen to weaselboy, there are a lot of people on this forum who stop thinking as soon as they hear HDD and automatically assume that's your problem. Might be worth looking at activity monitor, keep it running somewhere so that you can see if there's anything taking up CPU when it beachballs. If you can reproduce it easily, I'd take it back to the store and show them

 

[J.Gallardo]

This has nothing to do with the fact you have a Fusion drive vs. a pure SSD setup. You have something else going on locking up your system.

A Fusion drive is not as fast launching apps as an SSD, but it nothing like what you are describing.

Has it always done this since new? Can you think of anything you did or installed that brought this on.

What you might try as a test is hold the shift key down at boot time to startup in safe mode. That stops all launch and startup items from running. If that fixes it, it tells you it is some launch or startup item causing this. Give it a try and let us know.

...perhaps OP hasn't described his iMac exactly? He says it mounts a 1 TB HDD. It's the base option, NO FUSION, 5400rpm.
(MacOS smartly puts most used apps in ssd section in a Fusion Drive).

 

[Weaselboy]

...perhaps OP hasn't described his iMac exactly? He says it mounts a 1 TB HDD. It's the base option, NO FUSION, 5400rpm.
(MacOS smartly puts most used apps in ssd section in a Fusion Drive).

Even then it would not beachball that long. OP is talking about launching an app and it sits there beachballing after two hours. That is just not normal even on an old Mac with the slowest hard drive known to man.