Extremely Slow iMac
A few months ago I bought a new iMac. It has 16GB of RAM, a 1TB Fusion Drive, is a 21.5" Retina model, and has a 3.1GHz Intel Core i5. It has Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 15.36MB.
The issue is it runs VERY slow. At first I thought it was my imagination. It's a secondary Mac. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro with a Core i7, 16GB, and 1TB SSD Drive. I thought a Core i5 and Fusion Drive are maybe just much slower than a Core i7 and SSD Drive.
A couple months ago though I used a friend's 7 year old MacBook Pro with 8GB and a standard drive and much slower processor to realize that it was faster than my iMac and this was with multiple windows open. For example I have opened Safari on the iMac with nothing else open and tried to simply watch a video on a news site and it kept stuttering and beachballing.
The issue is it runs VERY slow. At first I thought it was my imagination. It's a secondary Mac. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro with a Core i7, 16GB, and 1TB SSD Drive. I thought a Core i5 and Fusion Drive are maybe just much slower than a Core i7 and SSD Drive.
A couple months ago though I used a friend's 7 year old MacBook Pro with 8GB and a standard drive and much slower processor to realize that it was faster than my iMac and this was with multiple windows open. For example I have opened Safari on the iMac with nothing else open and tried to simply watch a video on a news site and it kept stuttering and beachballing.
I was going to do something about it at the time but I knew Sierra was coming out in the near future. I thought maybe something was just quirky in the system and a update to a new OS may fix it so I put up with it being slow since it was a second computer but no such luck. It's as slow as ever.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Since it's always been like this I wonder if it's some type of hardware problem with maybe the Fusion drive or possibly the memory or even CPU. If necessary I'm glad to make an appointment and go into the Genius Bar and it would be under warranty. Yet if it's something simple I can diagnose and fix with time at home I would rather do that. Is there any type of speed test or diagnostics I should do on it? I have some background apps running but it's not as many as I have on my MacBook Pro. I just wondered if something is using up resources and causing the speed to be slow. Yet boot up also takes a long time so it's not just while it's running.
Thanks for any advice or ideas.
Comments
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12
When you get a new machine the newer systems encrypt the whole drive. That takes a long time on a hard drive. It shouldn't still be a problem after months but it depends on how often it's used. A 1TB drive can take a few hours to encrypt. Spotlight indexes the drive too. Typing the following into the terminal:
diskutil cs list
will let you see the encryption status of the drive.
Another thing to do would be to boot into safe mode by holding shift at boot to clean out any caches and rebuild them by rebooting again. You can check CPU/memory in the Activity Monitor but beachballing is usually down to the hard drive, especially with Safari as it caches pages and media to the drive when it loads pages.
I'm sure there were reports of the Fusion drives being 5400 RPM and getting a smaller Flash cache.
An easy way to check if it's the drive is to boot the iMac from an external SSD. If you put your laptop into target mode, you can probably boot from that internal SSD by holding alt/option at boot on the iMac and selecting the MBP drive to boot from. That will let you know if it's the Fusion drive slowing things down.