Expecting too much?

[Peakoverload]

Apologies in advance for the length of this post but this has been driving me mad for months and I've tried so many things.

My current iMac is a 27" Mid 2011 model with a 3.1Ghz i5 CPU, 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM and a 1TB drive. Currently I have 350GB available space on that drive. This system is running Sierra.
I also have 3x USB drives (1 being my Time Machine Drive).

I've found that the Mac is running on the slow side and has been for quite some time, probably since around the time Yosemite was released and installed. It's not yet at the unusable side and for general web surfing is, mostly, fine. It is however becoming more and more frustrating. Excel 2016 is very slow, opening Lightroom takes a long time, Final Cut Pro X is fine until I start to play sections with titles over them or with multiple layers and then it starts to stutter a bit. Firefox, Photoshop can take a while to launch, Finder always takes a while time to show the contents of folders be they on external or internal drives like the Application folder for example, the beachball comes up quite a few times when doing general stuff even from having several tabs open in Firefox.

I had thought, "well it's 5 years old now, maybe it just can't handle the latest OS's and 64bit programs that well anymore". However I've just looked at the spec of the latest 27" iMac which has: a 3.3Ghz i5 CPU, 8GB of 1867Mhz RAM and a 2TB Fusion Drive. So the CPU is only slightly faster than what I have and is still and i5. The RAM has a faster bus speed by about 30% and the drive is bigger with a SSD section. Okay, yes I would expect that system to be fast but by comparison I wouldn't expect my system to be that far behind it speed wise.

So, do I need to just bite the bullet and replace my iMac or is there, as I suspect, something not quite right with it? Should I expect my iMac to be a faster than what it currently is?

The biggest issue I have with my iMac is the length of time it takes to boot up. Now I don't mean the amount of time it takes to load OSX and log in, that's reasonably okay. Once I've logged in, it then takes several minutes with what sounds like a fair bit of disc accessing for the system to have loaded whatever it seems to think it needs to load and until the system has completed that launching anything takes ages. It's now at the stage that not only do I not shut the Mac down anymore but I've set it to never sleep as waking it back up takes several minutes before it's fully usable again.

These are the things I've tried so far to speed my iMac up.

1. Cleared desktop of all icons/files
2. Checked what login items I have running. Only 1, Plex Media Server, and I've tried removing that too.
3. Reset PRAMs
4. Reset NVRAM
5. Repaired Disk Permissions
6. Set Spotlight to not index any of my USB drives
7. Checked Activity Monitor for CPU and RAM usage and can't see anything out of the ordinary. Currently I have iTunes, Final Cut Pro X, Firefox, Word, Excel, DriveDX open and the CPU is 95% idle with 10GB of used memory. CPU usage does increase when I start to actually use these programs obviously but the system can be slow when no programs are running.

Nothing has made any difference at all.

I don't have any AV software running but I do have the following Menu Bar Apps that do load on Start Up. Adobe Creative Cloud, Menu Tab Pro for Facebook, Plex Media Server

So I started thinking maybe it was a hardware fault. I ran DriveDX and that tells me the following:

System Drive has no problems, scores 100% on most Health Indicators (above 84% on all except one). The only health indicator it scores badly on (but still is given an OK status) is it's temperature for which is scores only 47%. However it says that it's current temperature is 53 Celsius but it seems to fluctuate between that and 49 degrees. Yet the recommended temperature range is between 0-60 so it's still within the recommended range.

Two of my USB drives score almost perfect scores because they are only a few months old (1 of which is my Time Machine drive). The other USB drive does score much lower but then it's much, much older and scores only 50% for spin up time, 18% for Power On Hours and 56% for temperature. For everything else it scores highly (above 86% and mostly 100%). However this drive only contains my photo library, no other documents, programs or files, just photos and therefore it's only accessed when I use Lightroom or Photoshop.

So system drive is a bit warm and 1 USB drive is old.

I then ran Apple Hardware Test and this did bring up one error.

4MOT/4/40000003: HDD-1318

As I understand it 4MOT means Fan Motor and HDD means that it's the fan for the Hard Drive and 1318 is the fans current speed.

Looking around online I've read a lot of well intentioned comments saying things like "your hard drive is failing" but hard drive doesn't have a fan in it and DriveDX says my system drive is fine if a bit warm (presumably because the fan isn't cooling it enough). Looking at spare parts lists there is a fan that plugs into the logic board that cools the hard drive so presumably that is the fan that is failing.

That's all fair enough but a slightly warm system drive doesn't cause a system to slow down.

So I'm kinda back to square one.

If I replace the hard drive fan I can't see how my system would speed up.
If I buy a new iMac whilst I know it would be fast, it's spec isn't so different from my current one thus meaning my current iMac should be faster.

Is there anything else I can try to get this iMac back up to the kind of speed it should be running at?

 

[pigoo3]

Download, install, and run the free maintenance app called "Onyx". Once launched...just click on the "automation" button.

- Nick

 

[Peakoverload]

Download, install, and run the free maintenance app called "Onyx". Once launched...just click on the "automation" button.

- Nick

Thanks for that. I forgot that I had tried Onyx before some time ago with no success but on your prompt I download the latest version and tried again. I think this may have made some improvement, difficult to tell but once my system is up and running it 'feels' a bit faster. I need to use it properly for a bit to see if this is real or just my perception. The system is still slow to start up. For example I turn it on and the amount of time it takes to get to the login window is probably about normal, maybe a little longer than in the past but nothing that I'm too bothered about. I login and within say 20-30 seconds my desktop has loaded.

However I can still hear my system drive accessing. I thought that perhaps this was Spotlight indexing the system drive, but no, Spotlight is doing absolutely nothing. If I launch Firefox it then takes about 2 minutes before it opens. It then takes about another minute to load my home page, Google. If I enter a URL or click on a bookmark it then takes another 1-2 minutes to actually load the page. This isn't limited to Firefox, this is all applications. Essentially once I'm on my desktop it's a good 7 minutes before I can really start to use the computer without waiting ages for things to load. If I try to launch any applications before this time it just lengthens the time it takes before the system is fully usable. I'd say from the moment of turning it on to the time when I can really use it at a reasonable speed is around 10 minutes.

That seems excessive to me.

 

[pigoo3]

I login and within say 20-30 seconds my desktop has loaded.

That's not too bad.

However I can still hear my system drive accessing. I thought that perhaps this was Spotlight indexing the system drive, but no, Spotlight is doing absolutely nothing. If I launch Firefox it then takes about 2 minutes before it opens. It then takes about another minute to load my home page, Google. If I enter a URL or click on a bookmark it then takes another 1-2 minutes to actually load the page. This isn't limited to Firefox, this is all applications. Essentially once I'm on my desktop it's a good 7 minutes before I can really start to use the computer without waiting ages for things to load. If I try to launch any applications before this time it just lengthens the time it takes before the system is fully usable. I'd say from the moment of turning it on to the time when I can really use it at a reasonable speed is around 10 minutes.

That seems excessive to me.

I kind of experience the same thing. Everything you've done...I do...still the same results. And both of us have plenty of free space. I don't reboot my computer very often...maybe once every couple weeks...and this only happens with a reboot. Between reboots I just sleep the computer...and no issues. I'm thinking that when the computer is rebooted after a long period of time...when it restarts that first time after the reboot...the system is doing some sort of maintenance.

There is always the possibility that in both our cases the hard drive could be going bad/failing. Both of our computers are 2011 models (yours an iMac, mine a MBP). I only mentoin this as a possibility. Probably not the case. But something to be aware of.

HTH,

- Nick

 

[bobtomay]

Although not your issue, 1st up to clear a little misconception - today's 3.3 Ghz i5 is about 35% faster than your 5 yr old 3.1 Ghz i5.

Next up, if you don't have a backup, you should make one now.


With a 7-10 minute time after startup before you can use the machine normally, I'm more inclined to think the drive is on it's way out than not - don't care what any tests report. I've had several drives that acted just like this and tested fine that WD had no problem replacing under warranty without question. The ones they replaced did this even with a clean install of the OS.

If you were sitting at 1-2 minute times from startup, my initial reaction would be a fragmented drive and would suggest iDefrag could be worth every penny in this case. If it were my drive, before replacing (especially in an iMac) I'd try: a) a clean install and restore from my backup, b) using iDefrag or c) cloning the internal drive from my SuperDuper! or CCC backup to see if that made any difference and if so, then use iDefrag.

(After 5 years, it's highly unlikely that you have enough contiguous free space for virtual memory even with 350GB free space. If the drive is not having some mechanical issue with the arms moving around the platters, I could see 1-2 minutes to finish loading all the background processes and putting into virtual memory what it needs. But, 7-10 minutes is just too long for a properly functioning drive with 35% free space, even one that's highly fragmented.)

 

[harryb2448]

Sure sounds like hardware and as Tom says, hard drive suspect No. 1. Go into Recovery Mode and run Disk First Aid and see what is reported. The machine should be running Sierra like a champ with 16GB of memory.