10-30-2022, 03:29 PM
A non-techie friend of mine has a 2017 iMac with the ridiculous, cheap-a$$ 5400 rpm spinning HD. I remember her complaining about how sluggish it was after she caved in to the OS upgrade nagging. It was too late to revert it, since she had no clone or bootable external.
Since then it apparently has only gotten worse, and when she contacts support about how sluggish it is, they just tell her to upgrade the OS (they must know this is absolute BS). I think it’s on Monterey now.
I was there a couple of days ago because her cat had chewed through the power cord for the Seagate Backup Plus external I had given her a few years ago. I took the Seagate home, liberated it from its crappy enclosure, put it into a spare OWC enclosure, and reformatted it, then took it to her place to hook it up and make sure she could get Time Machine working with it.
That iMac took at least 5 minutes to boot up. There are glaciers that are moving faster these days. Once it was sort of booted up, anything we did took an agonizing amount of time. It looked like about half of the drive was free, so my thought that perhaps it is full of Time Machine backups is probably incorrect, unless they are invisible. I don’t use Time Machine, so I don’t know anything about checking for stuff like that. But her stock HD has a Time Machine icon, which makes me suspicious.
There may be more going on than just the fact that Apple put a cheap piece of obsolete crap in that model and had the gall to sell it to people. It was probably tolerable when it was running Sierra, but every subsequent OS is intended to run best on SSDs.
Everymac says that this machine’s drive is nearly impossible to upgrade. Designs like this make me want to start slapping some folks at Apple. And maybe track down Ive and put a cockroach in his drink.
I assume that running that machine from an external SSD would be a better solution than to trying to get minimally acceptable performance from the internal drive? My plan is to take one over there and test it, then if there is a dramatic improvement, we can set that up.
Thoughts and suggestions welcome.
Since then it apparently has only gotten worse, and when she contacts support about how sluggish it is, they just tell her to upgrade the OS (they must know this is absolute BS). I think it’s on Monterey now.
I was there a couple of days ago because her cat had chewed through the power cord for the Seagate Backup Plus external I had given her a few years ago. I took the Seagate home, liberated it from its crappy enclosure, put it into a spare OWC enclosure, and reformatted it, then took it to her place to hook it up and make sure she could get Time Machine working with it.
That iMac took at least 5 minutes to boot up. There are glaciers that are moving faster these days. Once it was sort of booted up, anything we did took an agonizing amount of time. It looked like about half of the drive was free, so my thought that perhaps it is full of Time Machine backups is probably incorrect, unless they are invisible. I don’t use Time Machine, so I don’t know anything about checking for stuff like that. But her stock HD has a Time Machine icon, which makes me suspicious.
There may be more going on than just the fact that Apple put a cheap piece of obsolete crap in that model and had the gall to sell it to people. It was probably tolerable when it was running Sierra, but every subsequent OS is intended to run best on SSDs.
Everymac says that this machine’s drive is nearly impossible to upgrade. Designs like this make me want to start slapping some folks at Apple. And maybe track down Ive and put a cockroach in his drink.
I assume that running that machine from an external SSD would be a better solution than to trying to get minimally acceptable performance from the internal drive? My plan is to take one over there and test it, then if there is a dramatic improvement, we can set that up.
Thoughts and suggestions welcome.