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I need a sanity check

iubhounds

iubhounds

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 29, 2010
169
9
I have an iMac that I bought new in 2010. It's build date is mid-summer 2010. It's the basic model I3, 4Mb RAM, 500Gb HD. I'll write what has happened in bullet form, that might be easier to read.

What I am wanting to know or confirm in my own mind is that my hard drive is on it's last legs, stumbling to the end.

  1. Zero problems from the time I bought it, October 2010.
  2. On the computer many hours per day, 7 days per week.
  3. Crashed and would not reboot Thursday, May 4th
  4. Tried all the suggestions to free up hard drive space, re-installed macOS Sierra
  5. Friday night and Saturday everything was slow, from typing words, opening programs, with a lot of hangups.
  6. Sunday morning May 5, I erased the hard drive, reinstalled macOS Sierra, restored my files from my Time Machine backup
  7. Moved Photo Library to external drive, deleted that library on the internal drive to free up max space
  8. I currently have 60Gb total on a 500Gb hard drive.
  9. This morning it went from working well to very slow, freezing, but not turning itself off.
  10. About the time I think it's time to go buy a replacement, it starts working perfectly with no issues.
  11. I ran Disk Utility Repair tonight ... no problems with hard drive.
  12. Right now as I type this, it is fast with iTuns playing music, a couple of Excel sheets open, Apple Mail is open and the Time Machine is backing up without problems.
  13. I did unplug all external drives and turned off Time Machine to see if that had any affect ... it did not make a difference.
  14. I have tried Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and all of them at times will hang.
  15. My MacBook Air wifi off the same network is extremely fast with zero problems.
  16. Saturday as a test I turned off my internet router ... went straight Word and Excel, and it was so slow that words or numbers were not showing up as typed and then would appear slowly, one digit or letter at a time.
I forgot to list what is did/does when it's not running perfect.
  1. Any program that is opened will "not responding"
  2. Open Finder .. "not responding"
  3. As I type this ... it is back to being bad ... type and no words show up, then after a minute or two words will show up very slowly one letter at a time. I tried to backspace for a correction, it hung up.
  4. Internet pages will not load, curser moves between two monitors but everything is frozen so it will not accept the clicks of the mouse.
  5. Hung up at 3/4 progress bar on start up.
  6. Once on Saturday and again today, after it booted up both screens went black with a moving cursor in upper left corner ... I let it set that was for as long as it wanted ... once I had to power it down, another time it eventually went from the black screens after 10 minutes and finished the start up ... ran normal after that.
I cannot think of anything else I can try. I was sure reformatting the HD would take care of any hidden issues.

Any help, suggestions are appreciated.
 
Last edited:
It does sound like the hard drive may be on its last leg. Consider yourself lucky - you've gotten almost 7 years out of it which is a lot better than I did with my 2011 21.5" iMac that I had. The hard drive went out on it after 2 ½ years. Just keep making backups and press on until it goes completely south. :eek:
 
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chscag said:
It does sound like the hard drive may be on its last leg. Consider yourself lucky - you've gotten almost 7 years out of it which is a lot better than I did with my 2011 21.5" iMac that I had. The hard drive went out on it after 2 ½ years. Just keep making backups and press on until it goes completely south. :eek:
Click to expand...

Thanks for letting me know that my mind is on the right track. I'm not an expert but know just enough to be dangerous I guess. I usually use computers until they die and this was my first mac, making the change from Windows in 2010.
 
nambuccaheadsau said:
Open her up and toss in an SSD. You will need a heat sensor kit from OWC so consider buying the SSD there as well.


https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIDIMACHDD09/
Click to expand...

This is wild ... I was just typing an email to a friend that I was going to put in a new SSD and add some RAM. I did that on my PC's many years ago with no problems. In the meantime I have my MacBook Air hooked up to my 27" Apple Monitor and have the wireless stuff working with it.

Thanks for the link and the suggestion.
 
An Update: Last night I believe it officially died. "Process failed" each time I tried to repair the drive, erase the drive. My last attempt was to erase and write over my date in 3 passes since I planned to sell it or turn it into recycling. After the 3rd phase it stated "failure" but when I finally got back into Utility Disk, the Macintosh HD icon was gone.

I also started getting the 'white screen of death', where it never booted up using the different keyboard combinations to start in the restore mode.

My last attempt, I had a copy of macOS Sierra on an external drive. It let me choose that drive for start up but after sitting for two hours, the drive was never started.

I am not sure what to do with it now. In the meantime I decided to buy an new 27" iMac, 8GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive.
 
iubhounds said:
I am not sure what to do with it now. In the meantime I decided to buy an new 27" iMac, 8GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive.
Click to expand...

New iMac, great choice. You can always sell the defunct iMac on eBay or Craig's list. Just specify in the ad that the hard drive needs to be replaced. You should be able to get a few hundred dollars or more to help pay for that new iMac. :)
 
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OP wrote:
"In the meantime I decided to buy an new 27" iMac, 8GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive."

Danger! Danger!
Warning! Warning!

DO NOT buy the "1tb" fusion drive model. It has a -tiny- 24gb SSD portion (and a 1tb HDD portion). TOO SMALL!

DO buy the 2tb fusion drive model (only a little more $$$). It comes with a respectably-sized 128gb SSD portion along with the 2tb 7200rpm HDD.
 
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Fishrrman said:
Danger! Danger!
Warning! Warning!
Click to expand...

I feel like this needs some Goecities gifs to make the point.

danger.gif
Danger.gif
warning.gif
warning.gif
siren.gif
 
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Fishrrman said:
OP wrote:
"In the meantime I decided to buy an new 27" iMac, 8GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive."

Danger! Danger!
Warning! Warning!

DO NOT buy the "1tb" fusion drive model. It has a -tiny- 24gb SSD portion (and a 1tb HDD portion). TOO SMALL!

DO buy the 2tb fusion drive model (only a little more $$$). It comes with a respectably-sized 128gb SSD portion along with the 2tb 7200rpm HDD.
Click to expand...

THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME ...
I just got back from my 40 minute drive one way to the store. Seconds after seeing your reply here I cleaned the hard drive, packed everything back in the original packaging and box and headed out for the exchange.

Currently transferring my information from my backup that was done just minutes before I received your reply.

Well worth the extra $300 for a much bigger SSD and double the hard drive space.

This is the one I originally wanted to buy in the first place. :)
[doublepost=1495656778][/doublepost]
oneMadRssn said:
I feel like this needs some Goecities gifs to make the point.

danger.gif
Danger.gif
warning.gif
warning.gif
siren.gif
Click to expand...

So that is the siren I heard as I flew down the freeway 20 mph over the speed limit ?? LOL
 
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The more I looked at opening up that mac and installing new hardware, I didn't get a 'warm and fuzzy' with other parts in there being 7 years old. Then I decided I would spend the least amount of money as possible and only replace it with something new and near the same specs I had. Even 8GB of ram, faster processor and 1TB of drive was an improvement over my older i3.

Then the more I thought about it, I decided that plan was a bad plan for the future if I had the money to spend on more. So I came home with the 21.5" w/Retina just last Monday. I hid my 27" Apple Cinema Display for 6 days so it would not influence the attempt to get use to the smaller monitor. I was running into problems editing my 100+ photos per day.

Sunday morning when I plugged my MBA to the old Cinema Display, that larger screen started screaming at me. Plus I liked the increased speed that my MBA had over the new iMac. So I took my two bloodhounds for a mile walk behind my house to sort out these old brain cells. By the time I got back I knew I needed a 27" Retina, some SSD and the Fusion Drive.

Where I made the mistake was picking up the 1TB, the last one on the shelf, thinking it had the 128GB SSD, not remembering that model had the 2Gb SSD. I estimated the price before I went and was kind of surprise they rang it up for less than I expected. Then when I started it up and used it for 3 days it seemed a lot slower than I expected.

This is the honest truth on this next statement .... today just as I was looking at the "About This Mac" checking the amount of storage, I get the email notice from this forum where Fishrrman sent me the warning. I was already in the process of making the exchange in my mind.

Perfect Timing.

They say you have to be a little crazy to keep from going insane. LOL
 
iubhounds said:
The more I looked at opening up that mac and installing new hardware, I didn't get a 'warm and fuzzy' with other parts in there being 7 years old. Then I decided I would spend the least amount of money as possible and only replace it with something new and near the same specs I had. Even 8GB of ram, faster processor and 1TB of drive was an improvement over my older i3.

Then the more I thought about it, I decided that plan was a bad plan for the future if I had the money to spend on more. So I came home with the 21.5" w/Retina just last Monday. I hid my 27" Apple Cinema Display for 6 days so it would not influence the attempt to get use to the smaller monitor. I was running into problems editing my 100+ photos per day.

Sunday morning when I plugged my MBA to the old Cinema Display, that larger screen started screaming at me. Plus I liked the increased speed that my MBA had over the new iMac. So I took my two bloodhounds for a mile walk behind my house to sort out these old brain cells. By the time I got back I knew I needed a 27" Retina, some SSD and the Fusion Drive.

Where I made the mistake was picking up the 1TB, the last one on the shelf, thinking it had the 128GB SSD, not remembering that model had the 2Gb SSD. I estimated the price before I went and was kind of surprise they rang it up for less than I expected. Then when I started it up and used it for 3 days it seemed a lot slower than I expected.

This is the honest truth on this next statement .... today just as I was looking at the "About This Mac" checking the amount of storage, I get the email notice from this forum where Fishrrman sent me the warning. I was already in the process of making the exchange in my mind.

Perfect Timing.

They say you have to be a little crazy to keep from going insane. LOL
Click to expand...

You ultimately made the right choice. But keep in mind that any Mac may seem slow during the first week or so, as the computer indexes itself, etc. After that, it's off to the races!
 
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