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Saga of the dropped MBP 2012

Beachguy

Beachguy

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 23, 2011
1,008
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Florida, USA
Some may have seen earlier posts about this. 2012 MBP 15.4", 750GB spinning disk, high-res (not retina) dropped about 4 feet onto the clamshell.

Running OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 beta.

It's been running majorly slow. I finally decided it was time to try to reformat, so I ran disk utilities, erased and reformatted, and fresh installed El Cap 10.11.0.

Rebooted and there it was. All shiny and like new. And slower than ever. Used an app to read the SMART feedback. No problems. Ran AHT (extended version) 4 times. It says all is good- no problems. I am stuck. I'm out of ideas (my knowledge here is much less than on Windows machines for such issues.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'll be upgrading to SSD once I can, but for now, I am in a bind. It's an i& 2.6Ghz with a 7500rpm drive. It shouldn't be sluggish like this.
 
What do you mean when you say it's acting slow? App/boot times slow? Seeing the beachball a lot? Is the drive making any unusual or loud noises? All these would point to a damaged hard drive. You could try Disk Warrior which is the best for fixing problems, but if it's a hardware problem then you are going to need a good disk.

When you open the process viewer what does it show? Is something eating the CPU? Take note that when you do a fresh install it'll be a bit slower for a few hours as Spotlight does its indexing.
 
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I would agree with the HDD, but with reformatting and reviewing the SMART codes, plus running multiple tests on it and coming up with zero issues, I have to wonder if it is elsewhere. Disk Warrior reported back that there was no issue with the drive. Replacing the HDD at THIS time is not an available option. I do plan to replace it but for now, I'm locked in.

When I say slow, Cougarcat, I mean everything from boot time to operationally, it is stunningly slow. Lots of beachballs. No unusual or loud sounds. Processes are not consuming a lot of CPU, not even the re-indexing for Spotlight. I do wonder if it is just the re-indexing bogging it down, so I will let it sit all day and re-index all it wishes and see if that changes. I never use Spotlight, but I don't know if other things I run may use it in the background.

Thanks to all for offering ideas and help!!!
 
Do you have an external hard drive? You could put OS X on that to see if that is also operationally slow (it'll be slow to boot because of the USB.)
 
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Good suggestion. I do have a USB 3 device I could use for that purpose, and will if this continues to come up short.
 
Beachguy said:
Good suggestion. I do have a USB 3 device I could use for that purpose, and will if this continues to come up short.
Click to expand...

Do that first it will tell you all sorts and if it is fine then it is probably a $20 SATA cable that is the issue they are notoriously flaky on these models.
 
Take the hard drive from your 2010 MBP and put it in your 2012 MBP.

If it solves the problem, then the hard drive is the problem.

If it doesn't, replace the hard drive cable.

Source: common sense
 
I have another drive I am considering dropping in that is in an external unit.

Moving the smaller and older drive over would upset my wife, though, as that is the Mac she uses. :)
 
Beachguy said:
I have another drive I am considering dropping in that is in an external unit.

Moving the smaller and older drive over would upset my wife, though, as that is the Mac she uses. :)
Click to expand...

The advice was to use the one in your wife's machine to diagnose wether the issue was the cable or the hard drive not a solution to fix the problem!!!
 
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