Beachball party on my Macbook Pro - HELP!

[c.eiermann]

Hi there,

I really hope to find some help here.

The situation:
I had a MacBook Pro Early 2008 running Lion (10.7.5) until it died about a week ago (mainboard broken).
In this old Macbook Pro I had two hard drives: 128GB SSD and 1TB SATA 5400.

I bought a second hand MacBook Pro Late 2011 on ebay and upgraded the Ram to 16 GB.
Then I put the two hard drives in the new MacBook Pro Late 2011.

The Macbook is super fast and very responsive but every couple of minutes it is hanging for a few seconds or I get a beachball randomly.
This can happen in Finder, Google Chrome, Adobe Dreamweaver, basically anytime using any software.

I tried to create a new account and see if the problem persists. And yes, it does.

I tested the hard drives (disk utility) and the Ram (memtest/terminal) and all is ok with this.

The Macbook Pro Late 2011 comes with a 256 GB SSD and an empty slot for the second hard drive. The Macbook seems to function normal when using the 256GB SSD with Lion installed.

Unfortunately my external backup hard drive is not working anymore so I can't restore from there.

What do you recommend? Would it make sense to make a backup now, take out the 128GB and put in the 256 GB hard drive?
Please advice!

Thanks for any kind of help in advance!


Chris

 

[esutton]

Each time I upgraded hard disks in my late 2008 15" MacBook Pro ( MacBookPro5,1 ) I experienced increasing beachballs. The worst was my recent upgrade to a Seagate 1TB SSD hybrid drive.

The sad thing is I had lived with this pain for years and a simple jumper change could have solved it. The late 2008 MacBook Pros doe not reliably support SATA II 3 Gbit/second.

See jumper diagram for Seagate drives. Note the diagram is showing drive laying circuit board side up. Other manufacturers may differ.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en?language=en_US

The sad thing is that my late 2008 MacBook Pro was designed to support SATA II 3 Gbit/second with it's Nvidia chip set. In fact every model from late 2008 on supported SATA II.

Then in early 2011 they added support for SATA III 6 Gbit/sec which the 1TB ST1000LM014 hybrid drive also supports. ( Hopefully they got SATA III right in their first 2011 model year. ) Unfortunately for me I do not think they got SATA II right in their first late 2008 model year

-EdOfTheMountain