I have installed a lacie porsche design 1tb external hard drive but how do I move things onto it so my mac speeds up

Hi Can anyone help? My Imac (about late 2008) was running very slow and I realised I had very little memory left on it so I was advised by the online chat buddy at Apple to buy an external hard drive. I have bought a lacie porsche design 1tb external hard drive which is great but how do I transfer things on to it so my computer works faster. I woudl imagine the buggest files I have are both photos and music (all bought form itunes).
Any help would be very much appreciated?
Thanks

How much free drive space is there? Right click on the Macintosh HD folder (or however you may have renamed it) and select Get Info.
The OS needs around 10 GB for its operation, but not all of that room is necessarily always needed. Depending on how close you get to the edge, creating more free space won't necessarily do anything to speed things up. It can certainy happen, but it's mostly a myth that low drive free space is a cause of slowdowns. This applies especially to zombie suggestions you may often see here to clear a certain minimum percentage of the drive out.
My recommendation would be to keep 10 GB free, plus room for anticipated expansion of your own files. So a ballpark might be at around 20-25 GB, but your mileage may vary, depending on how you use the computer.
If you have at least 10 GB free, then I'd say low drive space isn't causing your performance issue. Of course, moving things out isn't necessarily a bad idea either, if it's really needed--but you do realize that whatever you move out to an external drive will need to be backed up as well.
First backup everything, as this may be a symptom of a failing hard drive. This won't exhaust all the possibilities for the causes of the slow downs, but here are some things to start with: Open Disk Utility and select the drive, not the startup volume. What does it say for SMART Status, verified or not? You can better check to health of the drive with the demo of SMART Utility.
Next, open Activity Monitor. It's in the Applications folder inside the Utilities sub-folder of the main Hard Drive folder ("Macintosh HD", unless you have renamed it.) Go to the System Memory tab and take a screenshot of the bottom section only. (Screenshot is Cmd-Shift-4.) To insert it into your post use the camera icon above. Being low on RAM/memory can cause these kinds of symptoms. Like this:
In addition, see if there's any process or application consuming an inordinate amount of CPU. How much CPU is idle?

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I have installed a lacie porsche design 1tb external hard drive but how do I move things onto it so my mac speeds up

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