macbook 17'' performance! hdd?

[temen]

Help?
For having i7 and 8gb ram (sandy bridge version of cpu) I'm experiencing WAY to many beach balls.
Yes, I have hdd instead of ssd (Im planning replace macbook in this year so I don't see point of upgrading hard drive now)

What's curious - when I'm executing some process which uses disk (like grep over big directory) I'm experiencing slow down, but iStat menu for disk i/o shows me 15mb/s read/write TOP.
Isn't it too small?
How can I test my disk?

I'd appreciate any hints, thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD / SSD, to see, if it is the culprit:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

Using Activity Monitor to show you CPU and RAM usage​

* Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor​