What is Best choice to speed up i3 iMac?

[abbycat]

My iMac has suddenly become terribly slow (i3, 3.06, 12GB RAM). Not sure if my recent upgrade to Mountain Lion has anything to do with it, but I'm suspicious. I've checked everything else possible and am looking for solutions.

As a photographer I utilize my iMac and external drives as an image database. File transfer among drives is moving at a snail's pace. Recently had to connect some drives via USB2 rather than firewire daisy chain, tho had some previously without a noticeable problem.

I would be happy to get back to the transfer speed I had previously. Any reasonable suggestions would be welcome.

 

[chevalier433]

My iMac has suddenly become terribly slow (i3, 3.06, 12GB RAM). Not sure if my recent upgrade to Mountain Lion has anything to do with it, but I'm suspicious. I've checked everything else possible and am looking for solutions.

As a photographer I utilize my iMac and external drives as an image database. File transfer among drives is moving at a snail's pace. Recently had to connect some drives via USB2 rather than firewire daisy chain, tho had some previously without a noticeable problem.

I would be happy to get back to the transfer speed I had previously. Any reasonable suggestions would be welcome.

Add a solid state drive and a esata port.

 

[itsamacthing]

SSD drive like previous said... it will be a whole new machine

 

[cyclotron451]

trivially you could try Onyx; that can clean out excessive numbers of temporary files etc. (I'm sure I read that ML was slightly sensitive to the number of individual files on an HDD?)
Another thing to try is restart with CMD+S (into single user 'Unix' terminal)
and try the disk maintenance commands (they're written as a suggestion/prompt as you boot into single user) - but basically
/sbin/fsck -y repeated until you get 'The volume Macintosh HD appears to be ok' then
/sbin/mount -uw /

as both of these have 'mended' faults on my old iMacs, that weren't otherwise apparent. ("exit" then logs you into the OS X GUI)

I concur with the SSD offering wonderful speed-ups, my new Mac mini with USB3 external disk is also rather fast - I keep my zillion item iTunes library on external USB3 and have few problems, some RF crosstalk with BT/WiFi aside, but that's gone now.