Beachballs, SSD or too many drives....

[Macshroomer]

Hi,

I am running a 2010 MacPro 3.33 with a OWC mercury Aura Pro 120BG SSD in the unused optical drive bay. I have 4 3TB drives in the main drive bays, two are in a 6TB stripe raid volume, the others are backup and utility. I also have a OWC 6TB Maximus in RAID-1 for storage of raw photo archives via an esata card.

When I am using the machine for more than a few minutes, things seem to run well. But on wakeup or even if the computer sits idle for a bit but with no screen dimming, I can get annoying beachballs when accessing drives, opening Photoshop which uses one of the utility 3Tb drives as a primary scratch disk and my cataloging software that also accesses various drives.

I am thinking this is just drives waking up, but just in case, what else could be doing it? I am pretty stable, running OS 10.6.8, 32GB of ram, HD5770...

 

[derbothaus]

All drives usually need to be seen and live prior to Finder doing it's thing. Unplug the externals and see if the beachballs stop. That would be my guess. Could be the eSATA card itself too. But probably something in the external mechanism.

 

[scottsjack]

Hi,

I am running a 2010 MacPro 3.33 with a OWC mercury Aura Pro 120BG SSD in the unused optical drive bay. I have 4 3TB drives in the main drive bays, two are in a 6TB stripe raid volume, the others are backup and utility. I also have a OWC 6TB Maximus in RAID-1 for storage of raw photo archives via an esata card.

When I am using the machine for more than a few minutes, things seem to run well. But on wakeup or even if the computer sits idle for a bit but with no screen dimming, I can get annoying beachballs when accessing drives, opening Photoshop which uses one of the utility 3Tb drives as a primary scratch disk and my cataloging software that also accesses various drives.

I am thinking this is just drives waking up, but just in case, what else could be doing it? I am pretty stable, running OS 10.6.8, 32GB of ram, HD5770...

I know what you mean. My 2010 is running five WD 2TB drives. I have it set to spindown drives when possible because some of them only get accessed occasionally. I'd rather have the beachballs than have all five drives running all the time.