That darn beachball!

[Michael73]

Has anyone experienced the following behavior...you're doing stuff on the MP e.g. web surfing, writing email, etc. and you notice a sound that sounds as if the fans and hard drives have all but stopped? Then, when you click "send" for your email or another button, it's as if the whole machine has to wake up, the fans start spinning, the hard drives start going and you get a spinning beach ball for ~10 second?

A most annoying behavior...

 

[Consultant]

That's unusual, especially on a Mac Pro. You might want to contact Apple Care.

First thing they'll tell you to do is to open Activity Monitor, see all processes, and sort by CPU usage, and see whether something is taking up your CPU cycles.

You might want to remove third party RAM and see if the problem still happen.

 

[GotPro]

This is often the case if your hard drives have gone into "sleep" mode.

Go into the energy saver pref pane and uncheck "put the hard disks to sleep when possible".

 

[Firefly2002]

Like GotPro said, it's just because they're in energy saving mode... you're just saving some on your electricity bill (I guess... and some on the lifespan of your computer) by letting your devices idle.

I agree it can be pretty annoying, though. I think I have mine set to about five minutes before HDD spindown, and it's annoying waiting for all three to spin up (I don't know if it does it like this in the Mac Pro too, but they don't all spin up at once, they it one at a time).

 

[rpaloalto]

Me three, I concur
Change your hard drive to not sleep for at least 1 hour. Under energy saver in your preferences. I have mine set for never sleep
Yule be fine.

 

[martychang]

Like GotPro said, it's just because they're in energy saving mode... you're just saving some on your electricity bill (I guess... and some on the lifespan of your computer) by letting your devices idle.

You guess wrong. The spin-up/spin-down process is the most physically stressful aspect of hard disk operation, spin-up and spin-down is literally harder on the hard disk than leaving it running. Most HDDs have their expected lifetimes rated not in how long they'll run, but how many spinups until failure.

I'd only use power management on hard disks in power critical applications, like laptops.

 

[Firefly2002]

You guess wrong. The spin-up/spin-down process is the most physically stressful aspect of hard disk operation, spin-up and spin-down is literally harder on the hard disk than leaving it running. Most HDDs have their expected lifetimes rated not in how long they'll run, but how many spinups until failure.

I'd only use power management on hard disks in power critical applications, like laptops.

I actually realized that just as I posted, and then forgot to edit. Though total number of spin-up and spin-downs aren't the only thing that contribute to the longevity (or lack thereof) of hard drives. Power-on hours <i>do</i> have an effect on the life of your drive, especially now that virtually all drives on the market are running at 7200 RPM or faster, and many at 10K; there's also the possibility of a head crash if it's on. Not common, but it happens, especially if you have your computer on when you're not using it and drop something on it by mistake.i

So actually, I guess right(ly). Just a bit too late.

Thanks

 

[sash]

Has anyone experienced the following behavior...

Yep, sleeping hard drives.