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jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
4,981
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Colorado
Disk Utility and Tech Tools Pro all say my drive is fine and I ran the long surface scan. How can I tell if my drive is going bad?
 
TechTool Pro is pretty good about detecting bad blocks on a drive. If it passed the long scan then I'd say there's nothing wrong with the drive itself.

What is the issue that makes you think there might be a problem?
 
TechTool Pro is pretty good about detecting bad blocks on a drive. If it passed the long scan then I'd say there's nothing wrong with the drive itself.



What is the issue that makes you think there might be a problem?


Sometimes Mac is sluggish however it's only 5400 RPM running mavericks on a 6GB Ram late 2009 MacBook. Also I have to reset the SMC every 2-3 months due to the fan always running and never going below 6200 RPM.
 
Sometimes Mac is sluggish however it's only 5400 RPM running mavericks on a 6GB Ram late 2009 MacBook. Also I have to reset the SMC every 2-3 months due to the fan always running and never going below 6200 RPM.

Just being sluggish doesn't necessarily mean HDD failure. When you say sluggish do you mean constant beach balling?
 
Just being sluggish doesn't necessarily mean HDD failure. When you say sluggish do you mean constant beach balling?

When it first boots up it usually is a little slow, but after everything has loaded it seems to be fine.
 
When it first boots up it usually is a little slow, but after everything has loaded it seems to be fine.

Ram and age are your issues I think. You could add an SSD which will really kick the performance up a lot. Not sure what the 2009 RAM max is but that's another road you could look at.

Your major bottleneck is the HDD and the RAM
 
Consider making a preemptive strike. Replace the HD with an SSD. While you have the hood open upgrade to 8GB of memory. You will get max performance from the machine and not have a spinning HD that will sooner or later crash.

When you decide to replace the machine with a new model, you can remove the SSD and put a newer pre-Retina machine or in an external USB enclosure.
 
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