iMac hard drive is friggin' SLOW

[rckstwrz]

I have a 24" iMac, one of the white ones, with a 750GB hard drive, and anytime I access the hard drive, the whole system slows down. (Which is why I now hate Time Machine.) Is this normal? Would my machine be faster if I had a smaller internal hard drive? Should I start limiting the amount of apps I have running at the same time? Any other tips?

 

[cmcbridejr]

My guess is that you are having another issue.

Do you run disk utility?

How much RAM do you have?

I have an older iMac G5 w/ 2GB RAM and 400GB HDD, and that runs smooth.

Therefore, I find it hard to believe that your hard drive is the cause of your computer being slow.

 

[rckstwrz]

yes, i've repaired the disk permissions. i have Cocktail clean my system fairly regularly.

 

[powerbook911]

I have a 24" iMac, one of the white ones, with a 750GB hard drive, and anytime I access the hard drive, the whole system slows down. (Which is why I now hate Time Machine.) Is this normal? Would my machine be faster if I had a smaller internal hard drive? Should I start limiting the amount of apps I have running at the same time? Any other tips?

How much memory do you have? RAM.

I imagine the white ones didn't come with much more than 1 GB? If so, you need at least 2 GB these days.

 

[MacHappytjg]

How much memory do you have? RAM.

I imagine the white ones didn't come with much more than 1 GB? If so, you need at least 2 GB these days.

are u on crack i run leopard with 768mb of ram and use adobe creative suite or w.e its called quite good runs smooth and fast and requires 1gb even runs good on 512

 

[Leon Kowalski]

Would my machine be faster if I had a smaller internal hard drive?

Nope. Hard drives of the same vintage (in the 320GB to 1TB size range)
are all about the same speed -- and they're all about twice as fast when
nearly empty as when nearly full. If anything, a smaller (but otherwise
equivalent) drive would be slower -- because it would be closer to full.

Should I start limiting the amount of apps I have running at the same time?

It couldn't hurt. Opening fewer apps has a similar effect to adding more
RAM. Use ActivityMonitor to check for CPU or memory hogs -- it could
be something as simple as a badly-behaving dashboard widget.

LK

 

[cmcbridejr]

are u on crack i run leopard with 768mb of ram and use adobe creative suite or w.e its called quite good runs smooth and fast and requires 1gb even runs good on 512

I personally wouldn't use less than 2GB RAM either.

Sure, you can run OSX and all those apps just fine with less, however, there truly is a major difference between having 2GB and having less than 2GB.

I speak from experience, as there are numerous macs in my family with varying amounts of RAM.