iMac (late 2013 edition) slowness

[Tolwyn]

Hi guys,

Hoping someone can help me out. I have an Apple 27" iMac (Late 2013 edition). It runs well, no real issues -- but it feels to me that it's been getting slower. I have no scientific basis and more like a feeling.

It takes longer to boot-up, launch programs, etc. I know it has 8GB of RAM with a 3.4GHz i5 CPU. It has 1TB HDD (not fusion, not SSD). So I highly suspect that it's the drive. Since this is the slim line iMac, I can't really get in to swap it out easily despite what I've read/seen on the net.

Is there any suggestions of improving performance? Worth upgrading the RAM to max? Anyone in town that can safely do a HDD to SSD upgrade (it's a 27" so it's way too big to send away). Should I do a full factory restore?

Speed wise, compared to my MBA or Surface, which both have SSDs, it seems much much slower.

Thanks in advance.

[Flabbibulin]

Have you run Activity Monitor in Utilities to see if there is any indication of what may be holding things up? Do you run a lot of apps at the same time, have a bunch of apps/plug ins open on start up?

As you mentioned, an SSD would dramatically improve things, but there is a possibility that you have some bad blocks in your HD, causing some glitches. A lot of bad blocks will eventually prevent the imac from mounting the HD at all. You can run an Apple Hardware Test on start up to see if it finds any hardware issues. Hold down D on start up to launch this. Here is a link on this- https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201257

In my experience though, a slow performing mac comes back to the HD being a SATA and not SSD. Are you running Yosemite? I am guessing the iMac came with 10.8? I know a lot of people are eager to upgrade their OS as soon as the new one comes out, but performance will always be best when you leave your machine on the OS it shipped with- unless it has an SSD/Flash Storage and some decent RAM