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2010 i3 iMac upgrade advice

N

NachoGrande

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 30, 2010
986
1,714
I have a mid 27" 2010 i3 3.2 iMac with a flash drive 512 mb video ram and 12 GB ram.

It takes about 30 seconds to open a pic in light room. Will I notice a significant performance gain if I upgrade to the 27" 3.2 GHz i5 w/ fusion drive 8GB of ram?
 
NachoGrande said:
I have a mid 27" 2010 i3 3.2 iMac with a flash drive 512 mb video ram and 12 GB ram.

It takes about 30 seconds to open a pic in light room. Will I notice a significant performance gain if I upgrade to the 27" 3.2 GHz i5 w/ fusion drive 8GB of ram?
Click to expand...
It depends on where the bottleneck is. Also, you may need more than 8GB of ram. You should see some improvement, but the question is how much.
 
I appears that my bottle neck is with my HDD. I have a 250gb SSD that I run the OS from and I store my current year pictures there is about 25 GB left on that drive. Then I have my original 1TB drive that only has 1.6 GB left. It takes minutes to open folders on that driver. I assume because it is so full.

I'm wondering if I'd be better off moving some of these files off of the drive and maybe that would help performance.
 
NachoGrande said:
I appears that my bottle neck is with my HDD. I have a 250gb SSD that I run the OS from and I store my current year pictures there is about 25 GB left on that drive. Then I have my original 1TB drive that only has 1.6 GB left. It takes minutes to open folders on that driver. I assume because it is so full.

I'm wondering if I'd be better off moving some of these files off of the drive and maybe that would help performance.
Click to expand...
On the system disk, try and get a bit more free, but 10% free should be good enough. On the 1TB HD you might have one of the rare issues where defraging the disk might be good and you should try and get 50GB free minimum on it.
 
NachoGrande said:
I appears that my bottle neck is with my HDD. I have a 250gb SSD that I run the OS from and I store my current year pictures there is about 25 GB left on that drive. Then I have my original 1TB drive that only has 1.6 GB left. It takes minutes to open folders on that driver. I assume because it is so full.

I'm wondering if I'd be better off moving some of these files off of the drive and maybe that would help performance.
Click to expand...

Be aware that a new Fusion Drive will likely not help your situation, and might be slower. For all intents and purposes, you already have a Fusion Drive, it just isn't fuzed yet. The FD comes with a 128GB SSD; yours is 250, so your getting about 120 more GB of memory at SSD speeds.
 
Looks like there is some issue with the drive. I'm trying to delete files from it, but it's taking 24 hrs so far and it only deleted 16 gb. I just picked up a 500 gb SSD as the secondary drive and I'm hoping this speeds things up and saves me about 2k.

EDIT: I just realized I can't replace the main drive because of the temperature sensor. And the disk utility is not saying that is can not repair and and to backup as many files as possible.
 
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