iMac 2011 performance, external storage and ram

[twenuk]

Hi all,

i have an iMac mid 2011 i5 and love it however have a couple of queries:

1. i upgraded the stock 4gb of ram with two additional 4gb sticks to give a total of 12gb but the iMac seemed slower. Is this normal as ram same speed/spec and wondered if it was because it was in different slots.

2. performance has really dropped off further generally running latest high Sierra. Was thinking of external ssd ( don’t want to open her up) as can here a lot of disk actvity but options seem to be usb2, FireWire or thunderbolt 1 Type enclosure.

is there anything I can do to improve performance, or external storage options people could help me with ?

Thanks

T

 

[tommydlife]

Check to make sure all the ram registers in About this Mac - and that it's should be the right clocks speed which is probably 1333 MHZ - PC3-10600 (1333) DDR3 204-pin SO-DIMM. You want to pair them in the channels so Slot 1/3 (4 GB Ram Chips) and Slot 2/4 (2 GB Ram Chips).

Download drivedx to test the health of your HD. And yes any external or internal SSD you can create a bootable OS and run faster unless you want to open your iMac and install inside (which is relatively easy on your model).

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

And it will get slower and slower with a molasses platter drive. Consider either cracking it open and replacing with an SS, or use an SSD externally as the boot drive, connected via ThunderBolt1. USB2 will be too slow.

Used a 240GB Silicon Power ThunderBolt drive externally when I had that model and it worked a treat, faster than the then OW internal SSD.

 

[twenuk]

thank you all, can you recommend an enclosure for ssd ?

 

[twenuk]

I ran onyx to tidy machine rebuild mail cache etc and it really helped in case this helps others