My imac is running slow after i reinstalled mac os 10.11. I change to a bigger hard drive and reinstalled the mac 0s 10.11 and did all the updates. After installing the updates it seems to run slower. when i click on programs they won't open up right away. I click on google chrome and it take a minute or two to open same thing with itunes and other stuff. Web pages load slow now. I don't know if apple updates slowed down the computer. it has a 2.66ghz cpu and 4gb of memory. thanks for the help.
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Resolved imac early 2009
- Thread starter gwb21471
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Are you running a mechanical hard drive? That will be exactly why everything is incredibly slow. Ditch that HDD for a cheap SSD and everything will be fast.
Even so, it shouldn't "take a minute or two" for programs to open - even on a HDD.
I suspect that the RAM is also a culprit here. My my experience, 4GB with El Capitan is insufficient if you're running several programs and Chrome is a notorious resource hog at the best of times.
True, though if the drive OP put in was already on it's way out (eg: a second-hand/used drive), then maybe it make sense. If it's an SSD, then something else is definitely going on.
At one point, I actually ran Big Sur on my A1342 with only 4GB. It wasn't the best experience ever, but it was very usuable for light web browsing. However, I wasn't using Chrome, so that's makes a difference to performance.
I would suggest you run a test on your SSD. Very strange brand name.
I have Mac OS El Capitan running on HDD with cMP 1,1. Except for the boot process which is quite slow, other things run inside Mac OS are pretty fast.
It's almost certain that this SSD is the cause of your problems. It's a cost effective device but that translates into sub-par performance.
I found this comment on YouTube by the owner of a Bilksem SSD...
Yeah, that's just cheap Aliexpress tat. But knowing that they sell 500gb models for only 20 quid, you'd have to imagine the cost cutting they performed to get to that price
It’s convenient how the only YT clips, at present, “reviewing” the Bliksem are short, uninformative “informotionals”. Uhm.
That alone does not bode well. Contrast this with other, small-name SSDs from the PRC, such as Zheino, Dogfish, and Netac, which at least have a few cursory reviews, separate from reviews elsewhere not associated with sales review pages.
I recognize this doesn’t help with the original poster’s issue, per se.
It does help to reinforce the warning that you need to be cautious about storage devices and makes/prices.
When I first began buying mSATA, m.2, and 2.5-inch form factor SATA SSDs from lesser-known brands, it was for two reasons. One was I wanted something cheap (and, if necessary, disposable) to test whether throwing solid-state storage on my iBook G3/466 was feasible. The other was, in early 2018, what I was seeing available by the big spinner companies was not quite the emphasis on solid-state storage they place nowadays.
So next step: do a lot of homework for what I could get in Canada from these funky-named vendors from the PRC. And by “homework”, some considerable cross-checking from somewhat reputable sources, reviews (if any existed), and most importantly, substantive critiques. Even now, with some experience of spotting the sketch from the fairly consistent quality variations, it’s still not easy.
iRecdata was where I sourced my first two, off-brand SSDs in 2018. Then in 2019 and 2020, I bought four Dogfish SSDs — all of these m.2 form factor. (Two now live in a RAID 0 configuration, using one of those StarTech 2.5-inch SATA adapters with room for two m.2 SSDs and pins to set for JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1, and this lives inside a FW800/USB3 enclosure.) I have been forunate, and I think the cross-checking paid off: all of these are still working well and doing exactly what I hoped they’d do.
Thanks to other folks on here, I am also aware the general quality in Zheino and Netac SSDs, which have shown themselves well for those folks (even as I can’t get Zheino here and Netac, whenever they do turn up in Canada, aren’t as cheap as they’ve been south of the border).
What I have since learnt since 2018:
The importance of the presence/absence of a DRAM cache (one of those YT clips earlier referred to this as something else, but basically on-board RAM). I’m fairly certain most of the bolded brands mentioned above lack DRAM caches. For their use in my PowerPC Macs, I don’t think any of them will saturate the limits of a DRAM-less SSD — or if they do, then infrequently. The last two SATA SSDs I bought since 2020, though, have been models with DRAM caches and both from an established heavy-hitter: Western Digital. Unlike in 2018, they had finally stepped up their offerings and pricing (not shocking, given their buyouts of solid state storage companies Tegile and SanDisk).
Given the overall drops in prices and improvements on quality and capacity, I think from now on (and especially so for my Intel Macs, given their uptick in speed over my PowerPC Macs), I’ll be sticking with SSDs which come equipped with DRAM caches — especially as the system (and I) are liable to read/write/access these more intensively than the DRAM-less ones in my PPC systems.
Also, after so many losses over the years (including the Apple AHCI SSD blade in my early 2015 MBP choking, then failing completely), everything gets backed up and, separately, RAID 1-stored.
I know you probably know all this from many of my older posts, but I’m covering it for @gwb21471 ’s benefit: do your homework!
Great advice.
I'm quite lazy and usually neglecting my homework particularly when buying things relating to PC.
Therefore I tend to stick to well-known SSD brand like Intel, Micro, Samsung, Skhynix, especially those salvaged from decommissioned servers. Their life may have about 60% left, but that was a result from running for 2-3 years in a 24/365 server. I can expect more than 10 year of life expectance in my home computer.
Each one, teach one.
In turn, I learned from you and @Amethyst1 the importance of selecting SSDs with DRAM caches for my Intel Macs - which led to me purchasing the 870 EVO for my recently obtained 13" 2012 MBP.
Likewise: DRAM cache or no sale.
Even the veterans need primers and reminders.
I've actually found that the three DRAM-less SSD's I've got have actually held up pretty well.Likewise: DRAM cache or no sale.
One difference between mine and OP's though is that mine are from well-known, popular brands (Kingston and SanDisk). They're nowhere near as fast as my with-DRAM Crucial SSD's, as I tested a RAID0 array with 2 DRAM-less Kingston drives a while back, and they just barely touched the speed of a single Crucial SSD with DRAM (all SATA3 SSDs).
One situation though where in my experience DRAM-less SSDs are better is with SATA 1 backwards compatibility. As some of you may know, the G5's are extremely picky when it comes to running modern SATA 3 SSDs as the G5's SATA controller is very old. My SSDs with DRAM are not detected at all on it, while my DRAM-less SSDs are.
However, as you mentioned, SSD's with DRAM from well-known brands are coming down in price (I bought the 3 DRAM-less drives I mentioned around 4 years ago), so DRAM will probably become a requirement for me moving forward too.
I replace it with a spinning hard drive and i up the memory to 6gb. it still runs slow. it has samsung memory. I did have ubuntu linux on it before i put mac os back on it. after i switch back thats when i had the slow down problem. Ubuntu ran fast on it. All i use this for is to listen to music and copy my music to it. I think mac's has very good audio sound. Thank you all for your help.
That’s why. As we have mentioned above, any SSD, as long as it is from a well-known brand (doesn’t have to be the most expensive one), will make your iMac feel way quicker to use.
Also, if you're using an HDD then the RPM makes a huge difference - even in these scenarios. I use 7200 RPM on all of my spinners and I'll never get over Apple choosing to supply their machines with 5400 RPM units as standard, given that their computers are hardly cheap...
I using a apple hard drive in it. I reinstalled mac os 10.11. It still going slow. I think linux did something to it when i had it on there.
That stock Apple hard drive is almost certainly a slow hard drive. Different types of hard drives deliver varying degrees of performance and Apple usually supplied their computers with the slower (and cheaper) 5400 RPM hard drives instead of the much faster 7200 HDDs.
There we have it!
All iMacs since the ALS G5 have had 7200rpm drives in all configs. So either the drive was replaced with a much slower 5400rpm model later on, or the drive is dying.
Thanks for the info. It's interesting and confusing that Apple supplied the iMacs you've mentioned with 7200 RPM units as standard but not the MacBook Pro range.
Or perhaps even both.
Thanks for the help. Came to find out that my mac os 10.11 install disk had virus on it and slowing it down, I downloaded a other one from a different site and my mac is really quick now. I even put in a kington ssd too. Thanks again.