Catalina's performance on HDD vs SSD's

[Arkadelic]

Hey all, I recently updated my 1050 ti to an rx 5600 xt and as such, I had to update from high sierra to Catalina. The system performs quite well for resource-intensive tasks like video editing, rendering, etc., but overall I've experienced noticeable slowdowns in the responsiveness of my system. Finder can get really slow, opening and closing files take forever, just general day-to-day stuff seems to take way longer (overall system lag I guess?).

I read that with Catalina apple switched the filesystem for drives from HFS+ to APFS, which is supposed to be very efficient on SSD's but garbage on HDD's. I'm wondering if this is the major culprit in why things are slowing down, the system is currently running off of a Seagate Barracuda Compute 1 TB 3.5" 5400RPM.

Before I go ahead and replace a decent HDD, I'm wondering if there's anything else common that could be causing these slowdowns, thanks!
Current Build:

• i5-9600k
• MSI Z390-A pro
• G.Skill Ripjaws 1x16
• Sapphire RX 5600 XT
• Seagate Barracuda Compute 1 TB 3.5" 5400RPM

Running: Catalina 10.15.7 (19H15)

Geekbench 5 Scores vs benchmark iMac (27-inch Retina Early 2019):

• Single-Core: 1087 vs 1135
• Multi-Core: 5102 vs 5492

 

[Feartech]

Hey all, I recently updated my 1050 ti to an rx 5600 xt and as such, I had to update from high sierra to Catalina. The system performs quite well for resource-intensive tasks like video editing, rendering, etc., but overall I've experienced noticeable slowdowns in the responsiveness of my system. Finder can get really slow, opening and closing files take forever, just general day-to-day stuff seems to take way longer (overall system lag I guess?).

I read that with Catalina apple switched the filesystem for drives from HFS+ to APFS, which is supposed to be very efficient on SSD's but garbage on HDD's. I'm wondering if this is the major culprit in why things are slowing down, the system is currently running off of a Seagate Barracuda Compute 1 TB 3.5" 5400RPM.

Before I go ahead and replace a decent HDD, I'm wondering if there's anything else common that could be causing these slowdowns, thanks!
Current Build:

• i5-9600k
• MSI Z390-A pro
• G.Skill Ripjaws 1x16
• Sapphire RX 5600 XT
• Seagate Barracuda Compute 1 TB 3.5" 5400RPM

Running: Catalina 10.15.7 (19H15)

Geekbench 5 Scores vs benchmark iMac (27-inch Retina Early 2019):

• Single-Core: 1087 vs 1135
• Multi-Core: 5102 vs 5492

using the old style drives will be causing your speed issue

 

[Arkadelic]

using the old style drives will be causing your speed issue

Thanks for the quick response, I just wanted to confirm that this was a common / accepted issue and no one spotted any other major red flags, thanks

 

[Feartech]

Thanks for the quick response, I just wanted to confirm that this was a common / accepted issue and no one spotted any other major red flags, thanks

nothing else major with your hardware

you will see a huge performance boost with a new ssd or nvme, check the buyers guide for nvme drive