Super Slow iMac 24"

Question

Hello,
I've just completed a fresh install of Snow Leopard 10.6 with all the latest updates as a last ditch effort for the slowness of my machine. Everything is clean and fresh, no issues with the install. Here's the kicker - can take up to half an hour to boot up, it takes 90 seconds just for Safari to launch and if I click on the finder menu anywhere the pinwheel entertains me for about 30 seconds before a menu drops down. Activity monitor is for all intents and purposes flatlined. When it's downloading something it seems to go in spurts...like maybe it downloads fine but then struggles when writing to disk...I'm hoping it's my hard drive but it passes disk check. Any ideas?

Answer 1

So far I have been able to get up to 65MB/s over my Firewire 800. Keep in mind drive speeds will vary and most definitely become slower as the drive gets closer to full capacity. Try running xbench on the drive while it's connected to your iMac and then again while connected to the PB. Just run the drive test.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16231
Here is another nice write test that Looby originally posted:
It's easy to check your drive's sequential write performance without Xbench.
Just open a Terminal.app window and enter the following commands (each
command will run for about 15-20 seconds before you see the results):
dd bs=4096 count=262144 if=/dev/zero of=~/Desktop/junk_1GB
dd bs=262144 count=4096 if=/dev/zero of=~/Desktop/junk_1GB
The first command creates the file "junk_1GB" on your desktop and fills it
with 1GB of zeroes, in 4KB blocks. The second command re-writes the
file using 256KB blocks. You can re-enter the commands (as often as
you like, and in any order) to re-check the results.
When you're finished, drag "junk_1GB" to the trash, and empty the trash.
George