I have an iMac running Mavericks. It has performed superbly for quite a few years now. I replaced my TimeMachine backup drive with a Toshiba (decent) 2GB drive a year or two ago, it sits on my desk and has never been moved let alone knocked or anything. The backups work fine, but I have noticed for a good year or more now that the machine just goes VERY slow for a while, quite often each day, during routine tasks such as opening a finder window, opening a browser, running an app, sending an email, basically ANY task. After being frustrated with it I have tried to suss out whats going on and I have noticed that it appears to be 'waiting' for the TM drive to spin up. I can hear it every time this slow spinning rainbow thing happens. For example just now I tried to open a file on my desktop (a small png image, but it doesn't really matter as this happens when doing any task, at random) and I noticed after 5+ seconds nothing had happened. The spinning rainbow was shown instead of mouse pointer, and I could hear the TM drive start up, then spin up to full speed, THEN the mouse released and the file opened. This is a regular thing, 10-20 times a day its noticeable but it could be happening much more often and I am just not noticing. I asked a mac fanatic friend of mine a few months ago and he mentioned the TM drive might be getting indexed by spotlight so I went into settings and removed TM from Spotlight indexing. This made no difference. I just checked and the TM drive is still excluded from Spotlight indexing, so this is not the cause of the problem. Does anyone else know why the computer "hangs" while the TM drive spins up? It makes absolutely no sense to me because the TM Drive is a dedicated single partition drive purely for TM backups, so the machine should have NO reason to even spin up that drive let alone access any files on it when opening a small Png file!
Hope someone has an idea
thanks
Hope someone has an idea
thanks