2011 27" iMac, spinning, spinning. Disk Utility says I'm good. Help.

[3Pedals6Speeds]

My 2 week old iMac is really slow at times doing a variety of tasks. It's Finder, copy, paste, inserting rows in an Excel spreadsheet, all over the map. I get the happy spinning rainbow wheel, and wait upwards to 15 seconds for tasks that should be instantaneous.

I've run disk utility, it says the hard drive is fine. I seemed to have a jillion disk permission issues, I asked it to repair those, it did (and when I reran they were all gone) but still, no joy.

Ideas?

 

[reclusive46]

Try resetting the SMC and PRAM. See if that helps at all. I doubt it but its worth a try.

 

[3Pedals6Speeds]

Try resetting the SMC and PRAM. See if that helps at all. I doubt it but its worth a try.

I'll give that a try. Any other ideas?

 

[Gramp]

I've run disk utility, it says the hard drive is fine.

I don't think Disk Utility is able to diagnose anything physical with the HDD - just the content.
(And even then it appears to err on the side of optimism.)

Sounds like you have used Activity Monitor to rule out any one problematic app. or process, but you don't say if this has suddenly occurred or was present from day 1 (2 weeks ago).
A faulty HDD is certainly one of the prime suspects.

Time to start documenting things (presence or absence of HDD noise while the beach ball is spinning, etc.) to guide the Apple techs. in fixing it.

No point in having them tell you to reformat the HDD and reload the OS when there is sufficient evidence to know that is a waste of time.

Might be very inconvenient, but better to have a h/w failure in the first 2 weeks than just after the warranty has run out.

 

[3Pedals6Speeds]

Try resetting the SMC and PRAM. See if that helps at all. I doubt it but its worth a try.

Worked!