That way, you can take advantage of the full speeds available between the drive and your device.įor my Mom’s 2017 iMac, I picked the 500 GB Samsung T7 Portable SSD in Blue with reads/write speeds of up 1,050 MB/s and 1,000 MB/s, respectively. Need to Speed up your iMac: Choose a Fast USB ConnectionĪdditionally, you’ll want to choose the fastest USB connection available on your iMac. This should last you a while, especially if you’re working with hi-res photos or 4K videos. Or, if you don’t care how much it costs (or are working with large file sizes), get a 2 TB or 3 TB drive. If your computer is almost out of space, then choose the next size up. For example, if your computer currently has a 500 GB internal drive, then you’ll want to pick up a 500 GB or 1 TB SSD as a replacement. The capacity should be greater than or equal to the size of the internal hard drive. I recommend purchasing the fastest drive you can afford.
You may only see a slight increase in speed if the SSD you purchase has a higher read/write speed than the hard drive installed on your computer. If your computer already has a solid-state drive, then I’d only recommend using this tutorial if you want the “new” computer setup. On the contrary, we will be focusing on computers that have an internal HDD.
If you know how to download files and follow instructions, you should be good to go within an hour. To dramatically improve the speed of your iMac, making the user experience AWESOME.įurthermore, this tutorial is easy.To avoid opening the iMac (and avoid the risk of damaging it) and.To keep using your iMac without replacing it.
To quickly, inexpensively, and easily upgrade your iMac.This tutorial is designed for you if you’re looking for a way: Should You Follow this Tutorial to Speed Up Your iMac? Plus, I’ve included three bonus steps to help you transition from using the internal Hard Disk Drive to automatically using the Solid-State drive for daily use. The benefit to using an external SSD is that you don’t need to open up the iMac or replace any internal components.
Additionally, if you have an older MacBook Pro (or non-Mac computer) with a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), you can use these steps to speed up those devices as well. We’ll then set this external drive as the default bootable hard drive to speed up your slow iMac. This fix will take advantage of an external Solid-State Drive (SSD). How to Speed Up Your Slow iMac: The Solution No one likes using a slow computer, so I dreamed up a plan to make my Mom’s iMac faster, and now I’m sharing the fix with you. There was a real speed problem with the iMac. So, this wasn’t an unwarranted complaint. Here are the results from my Mom’s iMac internal HDD.Īs you can see, the speeds are 10 MB/s Write, 15 MB/s Read. Let the test run and record the read/write numbers.Then launch BlackMagic, and Press Start.Download Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from the App Store.You can skip this test, but I encourage you to run it once to ensure that you are, indeed, getting a faster experience (and not just a placebo effect). If you’re a numbers nerd like me, then you’ll want to run some preliminary speed tests before completing the upgrade. Testing Your Slow iMac with a Benchmark using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test