Beachball Problem..

[Boggle6998]

Right… losing my rag now!!

Ive got a 13 inch Mid 2010 Macbook Pro. Its specs are:

Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 (11B26)
Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS - Hard drive - 750 GB - internal - 2.5" - SATA-300 - 7200 rpm - buffer: 16 MB

For a while now, even before i updated to Lion, I have been getting a problem with the beach ball appearing regularly when I am running simple processes.

Primarily when I'm using iMovie i spend an awful one amount of time waiting for the movies to load or be attached to a project, before I am able to do anything… the beach ball appears for a good few seconds each time I wish to add a transition etc. My iMovie library is quite large, with 151gb of personally shot movies that I edit and make my own DVDs with… no, not those sort of DVDs!!

It also happens running pretty much anything else...

Im also finding that when trying to connect to my networked NAS drive ( 2tb Buffalo Linkstation ) the same thing happens and it takes me a while to enter any of the folders within it… I have put this down to my home network not being very fast, and a number of things running off of it, but I can't explain or sort out why my MacBook, which in theory should be quite fast with 8gb of RAM in it, is not…

Can anyone help, or suggest a program that i can run to see if I can find out what the issue might be...

 

[Detrius]

You probably have a bad hard drive. If you don't already have a backup of your data, you should back it up.

 

[kappaknight]

Maybe learning some patience would be good?

151GB of movies is a lot, even on SSD's it would take some time to process. I recommend you move all non-active projects out of the software and put it on a NAS. Also, how full is your HD otherwise? It wouldn't hurt to get things checked out but this could just be how things are. You can only push a hard drive so fast when it's trying to load up gigs of info at a time.

 

[motoracer1486]

I'm not 100% sure, but when you load the movies into iMovie, doesn't it do a lot of processing work (color balance, etc.)? It may be doing more work than you think.

Did you do the trim hack? If so, that may be the problem.

 

[kappaknight]

I'm not 100% sure, but when you load the movies into iMovie, doesn't it do a lot of processing work (color balance, etc.)? It may be doing more work than you think.

Did you do the trim hack? If so, that may be the problem.

Why would he trim a normal hard drive? Can it even be enabled on a spindle drive?

 

[Boggle6998]

Maybe learning some patience would be good?

151GB of movies is a lot, even on SSD's it would take some time to process. I recommend you move all non-active projects out of the software and put it on a NAS. Also, how full is your HD otherwise? It wouldn't hurt to get things checked out but this could just be how things are. You can only push a hard drive so fast when it's trying to load up gigs of info at a time.

Its not that I dont have patience, its just that Its annoying and concerning that it happens and I want to ensure that there is no underlying problem that is being indicated by this.
My hard drive is about half full, so I understand that its obviously going to be slower, i just thought that with 8GB of RAM it would be faster than it is... Also, by getting things checked out, do you mean take it somewhere to have it looked at, or is there some diagnostic tool that would enable me to check it myself?
The moving of data to a NAS is a good idea however, and something to be explored.

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You probably have a bad hard drive. If you don't already have a backup of your data, you should back it up.

Everything is already backed up, so Im not worried about that... but a new hard drive might have to also be investigated.

Thanks for the advice.