Bad hdd, ram or something else?

[zahrten]

I am having some problem with lion on my 2010 15" mbp. Recently it started showing a lot of beach ball and it would take very long time booting up. So i went ahead and reformatted.(I did not do that when opgrading from sl so it was properly about time). 1 day after the fresh install it started do it again. Just this time it went bad very fast. 3 days later and I can't boot at all.
I haven't installed anything weird, I have made an apple hardware check and passed. The SMART status says verified and I have repaired permissions and disk. Further more, I have boot camp installed with win 7 ultimate. And that runs perfectly.
Does someone have a suggestion? I'm about to order a new hdd but I would like to have someone else's thoughts?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Have you tried AJA System Test or Xbench* yet to benchmark your HDD?

*

You could also look at RAM usage via Activity Monitor, as shown below:

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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Further reading:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Making The Most of Activity Monitor
What Is Activity Monitor (or How to Take Your Mac's Pulse)​

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[zahrten]

I did have a look at both cpu and ram usage, and they were both as expected from a fresh install, all most not existing. I have used another program to check memory from within windows sins I can't boot from lion, and no problem there but I can't find a program that let met check an osx hdd from windows.
Does any one know how reliable the SMART status is?
Again thanks.

 

[ArchiMark]

Always good to check Mac with either DiskWarrior and/or TechTool Pro and see what it reports....these programs can often fix problems that affect Macs in odd ways...disk directories can get corrupted, etc...in addition TechTool Pro can also do other hardware checks...