2010-03-01

Slow iMac

I have a late 2006 intel mac core duo, and I was a bit upset about how slow it was. After some investigation I finally narrow it down to the internal HD performance. Looking at the system monitor I found out that I was getting on average 1-2 Mb/sec transfer rate, tops. Which was really strange, since I was getting better performance even from the external hard drive connected via firewire. Running all sorts of diagnostic did not turn up anything suspicious, except the slowness. Suspecting a bad hard drive I decided to replace the internal hard drive. After following instructions on the internet (not for anybody: opening up the imac is quite a challenge) I replaced the internal drive with a 1TB hitachi, and after reinstalling everything I now get 10-20Mb/sec transfer rate. Happyness!
So, if you find your iMac particularly sluggish and you notice that the hard drive is slow, it might be due to a failing hard disk.

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