MacOS Ventura 13.7.6 is very slow - beachballing constantly

Run DriveDx (free trial period) to check the health of the internal Hard Drive portion of your Fusion Drive. Post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar.

I'm assuming that 62GB USB drive is a USB stick? It would explain the USB2 speed, but that is a very odd size for any drive. I would disconnect it from the computer to see if it makes any difference.

You try running Disk Utility First Aid on the Fusion Drive and possibly even the hidden APFS Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the Fusion Drive item and hidden Container appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. Scan the Fusion Drive first, then the APFS Container.

Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll through the report. If any unfixed errors are listed, then run First Aid again until the errors are gone. If after several scans the errors remain, then you will need to try running First Aid while booted into Recovery Mode.

That is a lot of crashes for Adobe Creative Cloud and "routined". Even Carbonite is showing high CPU usage which makes me think you have a failing Hard Drive or a corrupt file system. I guess it is also possible one of your external drives is the problem as well.

seagreen939 wrote:

Thank you HWTech, I just ran DriveDX and my Mac has a failing disk.

<DriveDx REport.log>

FYI, the report you posted was only for the SSD. The SSD looks good.

Oddly, my spouse's newer iMac drive failed spectacularly a month ago. He only had a Carbonite Backup and it will take over a MONTH to restore his data.

Yeah, that is one of the downsides to online backups. They are good if you want an off site backup in addition to your own local backup. Some of those online backup services will also place the backup onto a drive & ship it to you, but to me that would be a bit of a security & privacy risk unless it is encrypted.

Looks like a trip to the Apple Store soon...

FYI, you will do better buying an external Thunderbolt3 SSD which can give you the same or better performance than the internal Fusion Drive even when it was new (depends on the external SSD though). A USB3 SSD with UASP support would give you about 400-500MB/s transfers which is Ok for average use, but may be insufficient if you are doing HD video work. Plus when you retire this iMac, you can re-purpose the external SSD for another computer for storage.

An official Apple repair will only replace the internal Hard Drive with another Hard Drive and it will be expensive.

If you do decide to get an external SSD for booting your iMac, then once you get everything installed & migrated, then you should try secure erasing the internal Hard Drive to overwrite everything to destroy & protect the data that was stored on it. I believe Disk Utility for Ventura still has the "secure erase" option to write zeroes to the whole drive when you erase it (IIRC, this feature was removed in macOS 15.x Sequoia). For the internal 128GB SSD only a simple erase is needed to destroy the data on it. Since it is a 128GB SSD, you can use it for extra storage....just remember to include it in your backups if you do use it.

Yes, that Hard Drive is indeed bad. It has 552 bad sectors that have not yet been reallocated which has created over 65K uncorrectable errors. That will definitely impact system performance.

If you do opt for an external SSD, then I would highly recommend erasing the internal Hard Drive and performing a "secure erase" in order to overwrite the whole drive with zeroes. Besides destroying the existing data, it should also cause those 552 bad sectors to be reallocated which should minimize the chances of the internal Hard Drive to cause problems even while booted to an external SSD (as long as you do not attempt to use the internal Hard Drive).

2025-05-26 CleanMyMac (5.0.9) - App Store

Is a major culprit for slowness. It should never be used in optimizing Macs. Use FreeMacSoft AppDelete to remove.

You are also using three cloud services, Adobe, Microsoft, and Carbonite. Pick to use one at a time, when all three are running at a time, you drag your network traffic down to a crawl.

Some of the more finite details were hard to read. But look on each storage volume and make sure none is over 85% full. One volume showed 480 Mbps per second access, indicating it is only USB-2, and could be slowing everything else connected via USB on the same bus.

Carbonite is the item that's dragging down your performance. It's using most CPU and lot of memory. I would suggest you remove Carbonite and all its supporting files.

I see CleanMyMac in your Software Instals but none of its supporting files in the report. If you haven't installed and run it as yet do not do so. Delete the app and don't get any other of that type.

I would rely on Time Machine backups as they are the only backups you can use when recovering from a crash or other problem.

Smart failure, you must replace the drive immediately and get any data backed up immediately that hasn't been backed up already. Smart failure is the reason you are slowing down.

https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/