Also the fact that my daughter has about 900 GB of files on it. The 1 TB mechanical drive is obviously what is making the machine run slow. They also said that is what they would do to speed up the machine.

They are basically charging $100 labor plus parts. Myself I’m a PC person not a Mac person so I’m not comfortable trying to do it myself. I called the local Mac repair shop and they quoted me about $300-400 for swapping in a 1 TB Samsung SSD and transferring over all the data and applications. It looks like replacing the HD requires dismantling the display and removing the screen so I'm not sure that's something I want to take on myself. According to their web site they charge $169 labor plus parts for this sort of work. We have a CitiMac franchise shop near our house. I'm not sure what that would cost if I brought it into a mac shop. I think that the existing 24 GB of RAM should be plenty so I'm guessing that the most logical upgrade would be to swap out the old mechanical HD for an SSD or fusion drive. Just that she is getting frustrated and it is obviously a 5 year old machine. This is not a computer that I use so I really don't know what the issues are with it. I'm curious if there is a reasonable and economical upgrade path for this iMac or if we are just better off getting something like a new Mac Mini and pairing it with a nice monitor. It is this model: with the 3.2 gHz processor, 24 GB of RAM and the 1 TB mechanical hard drive. It has basically gotten so slow that she is getting frustrated with the processing time when working with animation files. She uses it with a Wacom Cintiq to do drawing and animation.

We have a late-2013 27' iMac in the house that is mainly used by our 10th grade daughter for drawing and animation.

Late 2013 imac memory upgrade