iMac HD randomly goes nuts

[foidulus]

I have a 2009 iMac(quad core, 12 gigs of ram), and for the most part it runs fine, except every so often the hard disk just goes crazy. Most things aren't affected by this, but if I am playing any video or sound(regardless of the source, it can be iTunes movies, flash movies, the text to audio voices, whatever), it will stop playing while the hd goes nuts, then resume at the point it would have been at if it hadn't paused(occasionally the video goes all Benny Hill and runs through the video really fast to catch up)

I occasionally get kernel: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero warnings in my logs, but not always. Someone suggested this could be due to flash, but even with killing all the flash processes the hd still spins like crazy from time to time. I don't think the HD is dying as this has been going on for a while, though it got worse in Lion, and it doesn't sound like a broken disk. Although if this keeps up, the disk might wear out much sooner....

Anyone ever see anything like this? If so, how did you fix it?

 

[Macman45]

Have You Tried

I have a 2009 iMac(quad core, 12 gigs of ram), and for the most part it runs fine, except every so often the hard disk just goes crazy. Most things aren't affected by this, but if I am playing any video or sound(regardless of the source, it can be iTunes movies, flash movies, the text to audio voices, whatever), it will stop playing while the hd goes nuts, then resume at the point it would have been at if it hadn't paused(occasionally the video goes all Benny Hill and runs through the video really fast to catch up)

I occasionally get kernel: IOSurface: buffer allocation size is zero warnings in my logs, but not always. Someone suggested this could be due to flash, but even with killing all the flash processes the hd still spins like crazy from time to time. I don't think the HD is dying as this has been going on for a while, though it got worse in Lion, and it doesn't sound like a broken disk. Although if this keeps up, the disk might wear out much sooner....

Anyone ever see anything like this? If so, how did you fix it?

Running Disk Utility on the drive?

Open your applications folder, then open the utilities folder and click disk utility.

Click Verify Disk, and allow it to run through.

If this reports back okay, click verify disk permissions, and allow that to run through.

Then click repair dial permissions and allow the process to complete.

If you get error messages, post back with results It does sound like your HDD may be on the way out.

 

[FrankHahn]

Nowadays, the quality of HDDs has deteriorated very badly. I had three bad HDDs in the past two years. I now back up my data frequently and abundantly (on HDDs, on USB sticks, on SSDs, and on DvDs).

As said in the previous post, check your HDD. It is highly probable that your HDD is dying!

 

[foidulus]

Running Disk Utility on the drive?

Open your applications folder, then open the utilities folder and click disk utility.

Click Verify Disk, and allow it to run through.

If this reports back okay, click verify disk permissions, and allow that to run through.

Then click repair dial permissions and allow the process to complete.

If you get error messages, post back with results It does sound like your HDD may be on the way out.

Yeah, I've repaired permissions and done a disk check, nothing unusual, didn't fix the problem

 

[Laststop]

Nowadays, the quality of HDDs has deteriorated very badly. I had three bad HDDs in the past two years. I now back up my data frequently and abundantly (on HDDs, on USB sticks, on SSDs, and on DvDs).

As said in the previous post, check your HDD. It is highly probable that your HDD is dying!

I'm in total agreement with you on that. From like 1995-2004 I never had a single HDD fail on me. From 2005-2007 1 HDD failed on me. From 2008 to present day 4 HDD's have failed on me. Don't know what happened to the HDD industry but the defect rate of hdd's now has skyrocketed compared to 15-20 years ago