Ok so I bought a 2011 27 inch iMac with 3.4 i7 has a 1 tb hdd and a 1 gb video card. I love it but I get the beach ball with every use. It usually is brief sometimes 5-15 seconds. Is this normal? Happens with light use safari iTunes etc. same deal under heavier use final cut x hd editing. Has 20 gb of ram and doesn't page out. Seems kinda odd but new to osx and not sure if this is common. Thanks
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How common are beach balls on 2011 iMac ??
- Thread starter Ak907Freerider
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It should disappear within several seconds. If it's constant, then you may be experiencing "The Spinning Beach Ball of Death" (SBBOD).
It is pretty constant. The other day it completely locked up couldn't do anything called apple was told it is common for it to lock up sometimes. He said sometimes parts go to sleep and don't wake up or iMac to save power will not send power to some parts. This is why it locked up. He had me unplug it then restart. Seems kinda odd to me.
It's quite possible you have a bad stick of ram somewhere. It seems to be the most common reason. Note that I didn't say incompatible ram but bad ram. Memtest in single user mode is probably your best option, even though I can't find anything indicating whether the Ivy Bridge bugs with that program were ever resolved.
How much RAM does the thing have, that's more important than the size of the HD or graphics card? Use Activity Monitor the way Apple describes in
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
Make a new User Account in Users & Groups, restart one time to start from scratch, login into new User and see if that solves problems, if it did solve the spinning wheel your normal User Account has issues.
It has 20 gb of ram. 4 gb stock and two 8 gb sticks. I called apple tonight and it's not sounding good. We went through several test, including reinstalling osx. Still having beach balls. It is somewhat better but I can still make it freeze on a whim. Apple is closed now hoping it gets fixed Tommorow kinda a bummer guess this isn't normal for a Mac thought it was so lived with it. But now it is totally freezing.
I'm leaning toward hd from moment I got iMac it would beach ball. After installing ram it got a tad better but still beach balling. Now it is at the point of being super unstable. I'm not feeling like using it for editing due to it freezing and could loose all my work. Apple seemed like they would fix it we shall see kinda at a stand still now with work due to this being a unstable machine.
If you have an external HD lying around it would be an easy test if it is the HD, install OS X on the external,boot from it and see how fast it is, still slow it is almost sure not to be your HD.
Ya but booting with USB 2.0 would be dirt slow how would that solve anything. Also not going to pay $30 for osx file to load on a external. Also with ram it is pretty cut and dry if comp is reading the ram and it is registering it is there and has no issues. If it had issues it would not register .
USB 2 is slow, you m ight have had a Firewire one, I have one and it doesn't beach ball on that.
Bold, you don't have to pay $30 to run OS X on an external, if you have/had an external you could use Carbon Coy Cloner to clone your disk to the external or install a clean OS on it if you have the Installer disks or if you have Lon or ML just startup in Recovery and choose the external to Install to.
I dunno see what apple says really dont want to lug 27 inch iMac to the 4th floor of the mall. Got our first kid on the way any day so not in mood to be driving a lot. So hopefully can get in home repair or just swap out would be easiest. Will see tommorow.
Make sure that the Energy Saver settings in your System Preferences has the box unchecked that "Puts Hard Disk To Sleep When Possible"
I've found that if this box is checked, you're HDD spins down often and takes a few seconds to access resulting in the SPOD (spinning pizza of death).
If that box is unchecked, then it sounds like a HDD starting to fail.
I've found that if this box is checked, you're HDD spins down often and takes a few seconds to access resulting in the SPOD (spinning pizza of death).
If that box is unchecked, then it sounds like a HDD starting to fail.
HDD can do it too. It sounds like a hardware issue either way, but I would definitely test that ram either way. If you're encountering such issues, that should be the first thing you check.
That checkbox setting doesn't keep the drives spinning when your iMac is asleep, it just keeps the drives spinning while you're using the iMac and it's not sleeping. This keeps access to the drives fast when they're accessed during normal use. The HDD will spin down when you put your iMac to sleep, or, of course, when you shut it down.
It hasn't affected drive life for me... My current iMac is a 2011, so it would'nt count due to time. But my 2009 iMac had that setting and the drive never failed, even though it had one of the recalled HDD that Apple replaced. On our 2006 Mac Pro, the newest drive is from 2008 and it, and three others (that are older) that run continuously while the Mac is awake haven't failed.
My sister's Mirrored Drive Door Power PC G-4 has two six year old drives in it that haven't failed yet. My brother has a 2006 iMac that he never shuts down. He only puts it to sleep, and it's still running it's original HDD. I have that box unchecked on all of these Macs, since I'm the "Tech Support" for these Macs, and others.
It hasn't affected drive life for me... My current iMac is a 2011, so it would'nt count due to time. But my 2009 iMac had that setting and the drive never failed, even though it had one of the recalled HDD that Apple replaced. On our 2006 Mac Pro, the newest drive is from 2008 and it, and three others (that are older) that run continuously while the Mac is awake haven't failed.
My sister's Mirrored Drive Door Power PC G-4 has two six year old drives in it that haven't failed yet. My brother has a 2006 iMac that he never shuts down. He only puts it to sleep, and it's still running it's original HDD. I have that box unchecked on all of these Macs, since I'm the "Tech Support" for these Macs, and others.