[amluto]

I’ve helped someone with a rather clean iMac, circa 2019, still supported by Apple. Forget 6 minutes — you can spend a full hour from boot to giving up trying to get anything done.

I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.

[p_ing]

APFS is not designed for spinning rust, so that tracks.

[asimovDev]

these iMacs have horrible Fusion drives (128GB SSD + 1TB HDD combo) iirc that fail often. Have you looked into that?

[kstrauser]

I bet this is it. I had a 2018 Mac Mini with a failing drive that moved like frozen molasses, but wasn't throwing obvious errors. Before it failed, it was slow compared to an SSD, but booted up in a reasonable amount of time and ran office apps just fine, just with a little startup lag. It was bad compared to an SDD, but not intolerably slow.

If a Mac is running that slowly, there's probably a hardware issue.

[amluto]

Is there some reasonable way to check whether the Fusion drive is failing? Some quick searches suggest that Apple’s built in tooling doesn’t actually help much.

[kstrauser]

Sorry, I don't remember the details and it was several years ago. I do remember looking at the Console log and seeing lots of drive timeouts.