Frankly all laptops should use SSD’s today. Replacing the HDD to a SSD will also improve performance, which is a good direction to go as well. Even though the drive is mostly empty the scatter plot of the data blocks can cause the head assembly of the drive the need to cross one side to the other which slows the reading or writing. Many people think you can bend the cable any which way which is in fact not true! The foil conductors can be damaged as well as the shielding with the sharp folds.Īfter replacing the cable is when you want to run the defragmentation using a tool like this: Drive Genius 4. Be careful in your placement as you don’t want sharp folds but smooth arcs. Remember that your Mac needs free space to create log files, caches, and temporary files as part of its normal operation. It can result in long pauses, sudden freezes, and booting issues. I would place a strip of electricians tape across the uppercase where the cable crosses as the rough aluminum tends to wear the cable. Failure to maintain a cushion of free space is one of the most common causes of the slowdown. I would first replace the SATA cable as you are about to do. You would need to use a tool which can see the fragmentation as well as fix it. Hard Drives often get fragmented files which will slow the system down. This should make the computer much faster in my opinion. I am getting ready to order an SATA cable from this site and put in a 250 GB SSD. It appears this model has had issues with the SATA cable that exhibits this same behavior. I’m running Apple Hardware Test on the system as I type this. I checked the battery cycles (around 570) and System Info says that is normal. There were some things, but they are deleted. I have run Malware Bytes to see if there is a rogue program taking over the system.

I have run a Hard Drive Test with Disk Utility. I have checked the Activity Monitor (looks normal). Even the finder, clicking on menus, looking inside folders, etc … takes 5-20 seconds to respond.Įven emptying the trash. He creates text documents, reads email, surfs the net and that is about it, The main application he runs is QuickBooks. It has a 750 GB storage - but there is only 65-70 GB on disk. Possibly, the Hard Drive going bad as well. It’s running OS-X High Sierra 10.13.6 prior to Mojave. I am working on a client’s Macbook Pro, Mid 2012 Model.

Mac running slow how to clean up