2017 iMac sluggish

Richard

I have a 2017 iMac which I got second hand and upgraded to 32 Gb RAM and a 1TB SSD. I didn’t use it until recently as we had a 2012 Mac mini (also upgraded) which we used as the main computer.

The iMac is running Ventura. The slightly unusual aspect of the setup is that some of the user Photos and Music libraries are on a USB (A) disk

For a week or so the computer was running fine but it had recently got very sluggish. It will sometimes take over a minute to log in or out of an account, and apps sometimes bounce up and down for a similar time before launching. On other occasions it seems fine.

Activity monitor doesn’t show high CPU usage so I’m not sure what is causing it. The internal SSD is about half full but the attached 1 TB USB drive is about 95% full.

I am reinstalling Mac OS Ventura (as I have done twice recently) but when this is installed, would it help to create new accounts, rather than restoring everything from a Time Machine backup? I then plan to manually copy files over from the TM drive.

is this likely to help? Any other ideas for troubleshooting if the problem still occurs?

Thanks,

Richard

limnam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058278570/2017-imac-sluggish

Did you ever get to the bottom of it?

Was it slow if you detached the external drive?

Drives generally have a performance hit when they reach 90% fullness. Was this disk been accessed during the slow periods?