Massive slow-down after hard drive upgrade? (Macbook Pro)
Have an early 2009 15" Macbook Pro (Aluminum w/ black keys, 4GB RAM).
Previous configuration:
Original 250GB Hard Drive, internal
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB Hard Drive, connected via FireWire
Entire Music Library (150GB) on the 1TB Hard Drive, pretty much everything else on main internal drive
Performance was good with this setup. But I got really annoyed with carrying / plugging in an extra drive, so I copied my music library to a 3rd drive I have, then made an image of my original drive to my WD drive, and installed it in the computer as the primary drive. Then copied my music library to the WD drive now installed.
So, new setup is:
Single WD Scorpio Blue 1TB Hard Drive, internal, with OS + Applications + Music Library on it – everything
Since doing this, I am getting CONSTANT hangs, with applications (web browsers especially) becoming unresponsive for 3-10 seconds, the little pinwheel going, and sometimes even audio dropouts in iTunes (using my VCI-300 as sound card). This used to happen only very rarely before. I have not yet performed a defrag (gonna use iDefrag), and I haven’t tested with Traktor Pro yet, but I’m afraid.
Does anyone have similar experiences? How did you fix it?
I am pretty sure I just need to keep my OS / Apps on one drive, media files, etc. on the other since the WD drive is very well reviewed. I am seriously considering getting one of these which would allow me to go back to the 250GB drive for my “OS” drive and move the 1TB drive to just file storage.
repair disk permissions and errors should take care of it
ps: you sure your mac can take 1tb? when i got mine they told me nothing bigger than 500gb or faster than 5400 (for temp sake), but i have a late 2009 13" so i’m running a different mobo and only 1 fan
Wish I could help, but I don’t know Mac’s. Perhaps the free help over at http://www.d-a-l.com/ could help. Its basically a forum but the guys there are good and trustworthy.
yeah thats that I was going to suggest also. I was going to add a 1Tb HD in my my MBP as well, I think I will just buy the 1Tb HD and take it to Apple and have them do the swap for me though. It only costs around $75 for them to do it for you, so may be worth it.
verify and (if needed) repair the disk as well as permissions.
update prebinding.
and use iDefrag if you want.
Oh, and go ahead and either completely disable spotlight or rebuild its database.
If you don’t know how to do that, you can google it.
You might also want to perform a checksum on images before you use them that way, but i digress.
If all else fails, put your original laptop hard drive back in…make sure stuff still works. Make a Time Machine backup of that hard drive. Then, reinstall the 1TB drive and do a fresh OS X install including formatting the drive (make sure you have a backup of everything first). This is a good time to just not install printer drivers and language packs that you won’t be using, though with a 1TB drive, it probably doesn’t matter. During the install, you’ll be asked if you want to migrate from another mac or time machine backup…yeah…you do. That’s why you made one.
See if that helps.
I’m assuming that you have extra hard drives laying around because it sounds like you do.
OK, so I’ve done all of what mostapha suggested (except defrag due to the fact that it would take DAYS to do), starting from the first item on the list to the last.
Repairing permissions really seemed to help and almost got me back to 100%. But I’m STILL getting really annoying hangs in various programs, ESPECIALLY in web browsers. I’ve tried Firefox and Chrome and Safari and they all seem to do it Basically, click on a link, program (not computer) freezes, get a pinwheel, and then I get function back after the page is fully loaded or action is completed. It even does this on startup when loading my home page (www.surfline.com). The more programs I have open, the worse it is.
Fortunately, Traktor seems to be pretty bulletproof in terms of audio output. I might get an unresponsive screen, but whatever action I take is executed on immediately and I’ve only had one audio dropout with iTunes open, a 250gb file transfer running in the background, and 50gb of torrents going, too. Wanted to stress test it.
So, at this point, I’m REALLY close to 100%, and would LOVE to get the browser issue resolved (sonofabitch, if it didn’t just take 20 seconds for another tab of the forums to load, all while pinwheeling!). Any suggestions, anyone? Any common programs or processes that might be running in the background that I should check for?
EDIT: Or is this just something I should expect with 450GB of data on my drive?
Do you have any browser extensions that might be slowing it down? Since you use the torrents it’s possible you do and not even know it. Not sure how to check for those kinds of things. If you have a 500 gig drive and out 450 gigs worth of stuff on it that could cause things to slow down some I think.
You might be right, but it just seems really unlikely since with the SAME exact hard drive in an external drive case with all my media files on it I never had a single issue.
Anyway, it’s livable now, so I’m just gonna deal with it for the time being and hope that when I go to an SSD when I can swing it that things improve.
Have you checked the reading of the S.M.A.R.T ? it has to be “Verified”. You can read it from the Disk Utility and from the “About This Mac” → “More Info”
I would also suggest you to start “Activity Monitor” app and monitor the disk and CPU usage. The dock icon can display either. I also like the iStat Menu (the latest version costs something, but the previous one is legally free and I happen to have it)
