System go down hill...beach balls all over the place all of a sudden.

[detz]

Just started happening and it seems to be getting worse.

I have a 17" unibody macbook pro with 8GB ram and a 500GB HD. There is plenty of ram left and the cpu is only being used in small chunks by firefox so I'm guessing something is wrong with my harddrive. The system is up to date and it does not appear to be any single app, Adium is slow and freezes, vmware fusion wont really start or if it does it locks up. I tried running TechTool Pro but even that is painfully slow and has a constant beach ball. I was able to run the SMART check and it passed...any ideas?

 

[greg400]

1) Check console logs for when it beach balls and decipher what the problem is
2) Repair Disk Permissions
3) If all else fails, clean install

 

[Sun Baked]

Even though it passes SMART, the drive is still likely dying.

Back it up quick ... and start looking for a replacement, or send it in for a warranty repair.

 

[Dan73]

If it has been getting progressively worse then most likely your HD is failing and time to get a new one... or a great excuse to get a SSD

 

[detz]

Besides smart(since that's not reporting anything) is there any way I can confirm it's the hard drive?

 

[t0mat0]

How olds the MBP?
SMART doesn't cover everything.
How much HD free space do you have?

If you check the MBP subforum, there are plenty of threads about people getting lock ups, random/semi-random beachballing.

Best to keep your system with lots of free HD space - 8GB memory will help. Loading up VMWare might likely suck up some resources.

 

[Sun Baked]

Besides smart(since that's not reporting anything) is there any way I can confirm it's the hard drive?

Smart generally almost never reports anything, even when the drive is completely dead.

The beachballs and slow loading are the keys that the drive is having trouble reading and writing data.

Usually that is one of the main symptoms besides reoccurring drive corruption and the click of death.

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If your user bogged down with something odd, happens and can cause the same issues, and can be checked by creating a new user ... likely is the drive or the logic board, usually the drive.