Late-2012 iMac Maintenance?

[schmadrian]

Hey, all. Have reinvested in a 2019 4K 21.5" iMac. My late-2012 workhorse has 30+k hours on it, still performs its duties, but has been spending far too much time on the beach. (You know, with the spinning ball...) Unbelievably slow, taking forever to execute some pretty basic stuff. Hence the reinvestment.

As I still want to use it for those basic stuffs once my new one is up and ready, I was planning on doing a clean install and start fresh.

Any thoughts on this?

As a corollary query, I have over 300Gb of iTunes and almost 13Gb of Mail on it. (I always keep at least 250Gb of my 1Tb hd free.) Is there any chance that these two elements have been weighing it down all this time?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

[redheeler]

A clean install might help a bit, but the source of the slowness is likely hardware-based, that being the 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD.

My suggestion is to get an SSD to use as the MacOS boot drive. An external one over USB 3 is probably the easiest / cheapest way to go.

 

[schmadrian]

redheeler: Thank you so much. I'm shopping them now. (Will I still be able to use the existing HD for storage?)

 

[iTurbo]

I use a Samsung T5 external SSD as a boot drive on my late '12 iMac. Works great.

 

[schmadrian]

Me = Dumbo-ish, so please be kind. I now have a 500gb SSD drive with which to have this 'external bootable drive' adventure. So my current 1Tb hard drive will become, as has been suggested elsewhere, my primary storage space, while my external SSD will be the engine of my setup? (Final questions: If what I've presented here is true, how small an SSD drive can I use? And can I use a thumb drive, or to reap the benefits of a boot drive, it has to be an SSD?)