Upgraded 2017 iMac sluggish

[RickyB]

Hi,

In late 2021 I bought a second hand 2017 21.5 inch iMac. I upgraded it with a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB RAM and installed Monterey on it.

It worked fine for a year although it wasn't the main family computer, instead we used a 2012 Mac mini (running Catalina) which I'd also upgraded. Due to lack of space on the mini I had put some of the photo libraries and iTunes libraries on an external drive. I used the same drive with the iMac.

Initially it was a but sluggish but I put it down to things such as indexing the Photo library etc. It then seemed to work ok and I upgraded to Ventura. Things continued to work ok for a week.

Then, it got very slow again. I now regularly get spinning beachballs and apps (such as Preview, Microsoft Word) can bounce for over a minute before loading. Sometimes the beachball or mouse pointer freezes completely.

I tried a clean install and then restoring the user accounts from a Time Machine backup. It seemed ok for a few days but then got slow again. On this occasion I forgot to enable TRIM. I tried booting into the Windows partition and it was slow as well.

Last night I wiped the SSD entirely and reinstalled Mac OS. The Mac App Store was very slow so I downloaded Office from the Microsoft website. When I started installing it it said it would take 12 hours. It didn't take that long in the end, but installations do take longer than expected. I have now enabled TRIM

At this moment I am typing in Safari and it seems fine, I've just switched to an open user and it was ok too. But I've just now opened word and it bounced for about a minute before opening.

Any thoughts? I know it's an Intel Mac running the latest OS but it should still work, shouldn't it?

BTW the 1 TB SSD has 965 GB free.

Hope you can help!

 

[RickyB]

Hi,

In late 2021 I bought a second hand 2017 21.5 inch iMac. I upgraded it with a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB RAM and installed Monterey on it.

It worked fine for a year although it wasn't the main family computer, instead we used a 2012 Mac mini (running Catalina) which I'd also upgraded. Due to lack of space on the mini I had put some of the photo libraries and iTunes libraries on an external drive. I used the same drive with the iMac.

Initially it was a but sluggish but I put it down to things such as indexing the Photo library etc. It then seemed to work ok and I upgraded to Ventura. Things continued to work ok for a week.

Then, it got very slow again. I now regularly get spinning beachballs and apps (such as Preview, Microsoft Word) can bounce for over a minute before loading. Sometimes the beachball or mouse pointer freezes completely.

I tried a clean install and then restoring the user accounts from a Time Machine backup. It seemed ok for a few days but then got slow again. On this occasion I forgot to enable TRIM. I tried booting into the Windows partition and it was slow as well.

Last night I wiped the SSD entirely and reinstalled Mac OS. The Mac App Store was very slow so I downloaded Office from the Microsoft website. When I started installing it it said it would take 12 hours. It didn't take that long in the end, but installations do take longer than expected. I have now enabled TRIM

At this moment I am typing in Safari and it seems fine, I've just switched to an open user and it was ok too. But I've just now opened word and it bounced for about a minute before opening.

Any thoughts? I know it's an Intel Mac running the latest OS but it should still work, shouldn't it?

BTW the 1 TB SSD has 965 GB free.

Hope you can help!

I should also mention that DriveDx reports that the overall health rating of the disk is 89.9% and the lifetime left indicator is 90%

 

[RickyB]

Another update - EtreCheck says;

Failing hard drive - This computer has a hard drive that appears to be failing.

...

Performance:
System Load: 1.53 (1 min ago) 1.25 (5 min ago) 0.67 (15 min ago)
Nominal I/O usage: 0.05 MB/s
File system: 58.10 seconds
Write speed: 10 MB/s
Read speed: 478 MB/s

I don't have time to replace the hard drive now. Would installing Mac OS on USB C connected external drive be a solution in the meantime?

Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

For a 2017 iMac, you can boot and run from a USB3.1 gen2 drive (SSD) plugged into one of the USBc ports on the back.

This will give you roughly TWICE the speed as would a regular USB3 "a" port. You should see read speeds around 850-900MBps.

I'd suggest a Samsung t7 "Shield" (very nice drive). 1tb should do fine.

I'd suggest either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to clone the internal drive to the external SSD -- quick and easy. SD is the easier of the two to use if you've never done it before.
Both are FREE to download and use for 30 days -- will cost you nothing.