To greatly improve the speed and performance of your 2012, 21 inch screen iMac, you are going to have to spend some significant more cash for this to happen. Instead of trying to install a new hard drive or SSD internally,įorget any internal/external standard mechanical hard drive. The 5400 RPM is killing your iMac's read/write speed. Thank you for your time, opinions and help with this. If a new iMac is in the cards, what would you recommend in the $1,800 range for the purpose of editing family videos. That is assuming of course the new iMac can handle editing the video better. Or should I bite the bullet and purchase a new iMac. This option will probably run around $430. I realize that this mac is not upgradable but I am handy enough to replace the HD. My question is would it be worth upgrading the HD to a 1TB SDD (Either the OWC Mercury Electra 6G or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6p). My thought is that my hard drive is choking on the data that I am trying to edit.

but there is some 4k at 30fps from my iphone that I use also.) (I am mostly recording in 1080p, 60 frames per second. However, it takes about a minute twenty seconds for iMovie to start up and then there are numerous 'beach balls' spinning and the operation is very jerky at times. Also I am running MacOS Sierra, version 10.12.1.Ībout six months ago, I got a GoPRO that I have been using to make family videos and I want to use iMovie to edit them. It is a 2.7 GHZ Intel core i5, 16 GB DDR3 Ram, NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512 MB and a 1TB (5,400 rpm) hard drive (It is not a fusion drive). I currently have a 21.5 inch, Late 2012 iMac.

2012 imac hard drive replacement