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Extensive hard disk activity

Z

Z-Dragon

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 24, 2010
5
0
Hi,

My MacBook Pro is driving me crazy lately. Often it starts beachballing when doing even the slightest thing - opening/switching tabs in Safari, switching apps... But even more annoying and understandable to me is that it also goes mad when resuming from sleep. I open up the lid and hell breaks loose. Typing in and checking my password can take up to a minute and after, my system can be unusable for up to ten(!) minutes, again beachballing, beachballing, beachballing. Whenever I see this bloody animation, at the same time I'm tortured by that continuous rrrrrrrrrrrrttgrrrrrggggtttttt sound of the hard drive. I have 4GB of RAM and the described behavior even occurs when no heavy apps (e.g. Parallels) are open. Process Monitor doesn't indicate I'm low on memory either. The drive is an Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02 placed by Apple. I tried to find some software to tell me what actual process is causing this extensive hard disk activity, but didn't succeed. Finally, a permissions repair didn't do much.

It's ridiculous that it's faster to restart OS X than to have it have it resume. Suggestions please?
 
What are your 'page-ins' and 'page-outs'?

If you have more 'outs' than 'ins', than you need more memory. In simplistic terms, it shows how often the hard drive will need to be accessed to swap items in and out of memory.

Nothing else will suggest if you are low on memory.
 
Page ins: 19.89GB
Page outs: 2.60GB

So that's not really the issue, right?
 
mstrze said:
What are your 'page-ins' and 'page-outs'?

If you have more 'outs' than 'ins', than you need more memory. In simplistic terms, it shows how often the hard drive will need to be accessed to swap items in and out of memory.

Nothing else will suggest if you are low on memory.
Click to expand...

It sounds more like a bad hard drive than a lack of memory. Even high pageouts won't cause a computer to be unusable for 10 minutes. Also, OP mentioned that even little things would cause this, so that most certainly isn't going to suck up all 4GB of memory.
 
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