Very Slow Mac Ventura

Question

norm107 Author

Level 1

11 points

Very Slow Mac Ventura

Mac Running Very Slow

My Mac is very slow opening programs and accessing the internet. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Norm

Mac Running Very Slow

iMac 21.5″, 13.4

Posted on Apr 8, 2024 7:03 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Apr 8, 2024 11:14 AM in response to norm107

Your mac is unfortunately quite slow, in large part due to:

1) Having a very slow 5400rpm hard drive

and

2) Having only 8GB of RAM, which can cause the system to use more swap space on that extremely slow drive.

The easiest way forward, if you plan to keep using this iMac, is to get yourself an external SSD.

You can now get an external 500GB or even 1TB external SSD quite inexpensively.

Install the OS on the SSD and use it to boot your mac.

Use the internal drive as additional storage, if you want - though you may just leave it be, as you don't seem to have a lot of data. Even a small 250GB SSD will do, with the data you have now, but I'd go a little higher.

Reply

Answer 2

norm107 Author

Level 1

11 points

Apr 15, 2024 11:36 PM in response to norm107

Thanks again Old Toad & Luis.

I bought this Toshiba Canvio Ready 1TB SSD. I've obviously got it all wrong.

I formatted it as instructed, assigned it as the start up disc. The mac is slower than ever. Takes about 2 minutes to respond to anything.

Is this unit not capable of what I need?

Norm.

Reply

Answer 3

Old Toad

Level 10

214,446 points

Apr 12, 2024 10:13 AM in response to norm107

See this user tip: Using Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable external SSD of an Intel Mac boot drive.

Reply

Answer 4

Old Toad

Level 10

214,446 points

Apr 8, 2024 2:57 PM in response to norm107

I agree with Luis that the primary reason of your performance drop is the rotational hard drive. It appears to be failing:

Write speed: 62 MB/

Read speed: 49 MB/s

Those are abysmal read and writs speeds.

I use external SSDs without optimal cases for older systems and these types of speeds:

With an optima case those speeds can be doubled or tripled.

If you decide to go that route I suggest you contact Customer Support at OWC (MacSales.com) to see which of their several units they would recommend for your Mac model, work requirements and budget. OWC is considered to the be premier hardware supplier for Macs by most of the experienced contributors here.

Reply