IMac :: External Memory Drive Making System Slower?
Jun 19, 2010
After owning my Imac for about 12 months or more now I've noticed lately that it has become much much slower. I expected it to slow down just like all computers once you have used up a fair bit of memory space but I haven't used up much at all. I've tried to avoid using up too much space on my Mac by using an external storage drive but I'm wondering if that has the opposite effect? I've got the usual apps that help the Mac to run efficiently and I've followed various threads that show how to optimize the mac so I'm assuming there isn't all that much tweaking left to do... could be wrong though. A long time ago (i'm not sure what got into me) but I downloaded the apple developer software, I don't intend on using it but i don't what the correct names of the apps are and I don't want to uninstall the wrong stuff. I have tested the speed of my Mac with and without the external memory drive but didn't find much difference, but perhaps my tests weren't entirely accurate.
I've been using a LaCie Quadra 2TB Hard drive for a little over a month now.
I've been noticing in that time that whenever I have the HD mounted my system seems to run slower in that it has lots of sporadic hang ups. I get the spinning beachball in all sorts of programs from Safari to Microsoft Word.
I am of course assuming the Hard drive is to blame, so I was wondering:
Can running an external hard drive (for use with Time Machine and general storage) slow a system down (in particular applications)?
The hard drive is a 7200rpm drive and its connected via firewire 800 if that is of any importance.
I just upgraded my hard drive in my macbook pro to the 500 GIG western digital 7200 rpm drive. Now it seems like my systems is a bit slower that when the 200 gig drive was in it.
I recently bought a VANTEC NexStar 3 NST-360FBSU-BK. In the exclosure, I have a SATA drive capable of 3.0Gb/second. It's attached to my Late 2009 Mac Mini via FireWire 800. Based upon my understanding and in this situation, the FireWire should be the bottleneck. Therefore, I should be enjoying bandwidth somewhere shy of 800Mb/second. nfortunately, I'm not getting any where near that speed. I can transfer a 726MB file in 18.6 seconds. According to my math, that's ~5808Mb/18.6 seconds = ~312 Mb/second. This is not even FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 speed.For completeness sake, I also just upgraded from 2GB of ram to 4GB (both PC8500) but nothing seems negatively affected (in fact the computer is much, much more snappy!).
I'm running out of space on my Mac Mini's disk because of all my iTunes video files. I am thinking about buying an enclosure for my spare 1 TB hard drive, and using it as the location of my iTunes library, but I wondered how it works with the Mac Mini's energy-savings mode. My Mini is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, then wake when iTunes content is requested by my Apple TV or Airport Express. I like it, because it's very energy efficient that way! My question is, will the disks also sleep along with my computer, and will they wake properly when the computer wakes?
I want to put my old 15" PowerBook hard drive into an external case. I pulled the hard drive out of the PowerBook. And I purchased a NexStar CS 2.5" SATA to USB 2.0 external case. But the connections don't match. What do I need to do? Do I need to buy some sort of adaptor? Hard drive is a Hitachi 120GB 5400RPM (model # HTS541612J9AT00) 2.5" Sorry, these photos are blurry as hell. Picture of hard drive pins:
Pins are in the following configuration (1's represent pins):...............
I partitioned my HD and ran a boot from that disk. When I go and run a geekbench score I am getting 2400+ range as opposed to my 5800+ range I get on my normal boot up section?
ive had a look around an only found bits an pieces relating to this but nothing really specific.i have an imac 3.06ghz, 4gb memory. less than a year old its been making some noises recently (like a downloading sound for afew seconds every so often) which happens every 30 seconds or so. this happens even when theres no programs open and im not connected to the internet!!! ive only really noticed it doing this the last month or so to be honest.
the computer has also been re-formated about a month ago as it was passed onto me from a family member, an im wondering if its got anything to do with that?is this a normal thing for macs an maybe i just havent noticed it before, or does it sound like something is wrong??
So I have an old imac running OSX 10.3.9 and recently it started making a whoosh sound randomly at will. It sounds like a whiffle ball bat missing the ball. Also for no apparent reason it started saying "you have logged in" every time I wake it up. Any clue how to make these annoying sounds go away and or what may have started them?
I want to know, is there any specific way possible I can set up my external hard drive so that when I plug it in, it mounts as an image file? So say I have a file "Image.DMG" on my desktop, I want to make it so that my external hard drive "becomes" Image.DMG, so when I plug it in, that's what it mounts as. I would like to do this because I want to make a boot image using my external hard drive.
How does one go about using an external HD for backing up on both Mac and Windows machines?
I would ideally like to use Time Machine on the mac side. I have a 1TB Western Digital. Plenty of space, because i dont have that much stuff to back up.
I'm just about to receive my new Core i7 iMac with a 2Tb Hard Drive and was just wondering whether I could use my old 1Tb Hard Drive for Time Machine Backups.
As far as I know the requirement for a Time Machine Backup Drive is that the drive is at least the same size in terms of capacity as the internal HD of the system you're planning to back up.
I would really like to use my old drive as 2Tb external drives with FireWire 800 are in the 200+ region on Amazon and I'm not sure I would like to spend that much at the moment.
Looking at MacBooks, iMacs and Mac minis with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, which share memory with the main system. I notice on all 2GB machines the graphics has 256MB of SDRAM and the machines with 4GB the graphics has 512MB. Does this mean if I bought a base model mac mini, with 1GB memory and 128MB SDRAM, increased it to 4GB of memory, I would have 512MB of shared video SDRAM?
Does anyone know if there is a certain temperature that causes iMac's to shut down? I have been queuing up a number of movies in Handbrake and letting the iMac chomp away at them. For several months this was not an issue (this is a 2009 iMac 2.93 base model, no upgrades.) For the last week or two, I have come back to find the computer off a number of times.
Every time it has done it i was while Handbrake had the processor pegged at 100% for a long time. The 3 highest temps are usually the power supply, the Northbridge and the CPU and the highest I have seen them is right around 70C. Last night I did some messing around with that fan control program and got the fans to run higher while Handbrake was running.
I managed to keep all of the temps below 65C. I am going to leave it like this for a while and see if I have any more problems. I'm also going to try to cut back on the number I queue up at a time. I was setting up enough to keep it going for 12-14 hours. I don't actually think it was a time thing though as last night it shut down while my wife was using it and it was less than 2 hours after I started a batch.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? I see some people suggesting it could be caused by bad memory, but as mine only seems to happen with Handbrake at 100%, I'm thinking it's just heat.
What would show more immediate quality of graphics and faster on-line refresher rates, a graphics card with more ram or double the memory? Im debating whether to get the 512mb ATI Card or an additional 4 gig or Memory with my new iMac.does Apple not offer the really high end ATI Cards with 1 gig of ram?
When I eventually upgrade to Snow Leopard, I'd ideally like to do a fresh install (I did Tiger>Leopard as an upgrade install), but I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all my apps afterwards. So, would the following work as a best-of-both-worlds alternative?
1. Update my backup bootable system drive image on my external FW drive 2. Wipe the drive in my MBP and do a fresh install of SL 3. Use the Migration Assistant to automagically copy all my data and apps over from the backup drive as if I was upgrading from an old Mac to a new one
On paper at least, it looks like it ought to "just work"... but I'm wondering whether or not Migration Assistant will work between a Mac and an external drive, or does it have to be between two actual Macs?
which is faster & more efficient? to download photo & or video content from a memory card directly to an external hard drive? or to the computers main drive & then move to the external hard drive?
I am after faster transfer/download speeds with less hang ups
I copied a lot of information to my friend's mid-2010 MBP, about 80GB of data. Used iChat - transfer took about three hours but it got there.Before the transfer her laptop was very quick - didn't have much installed, plenty of free space. After the transfer, the laptop still have a lot of free space (>100GB) but is very slow. Before the laptop would take maybe 1 minute to boot up.. now it's over three. She experiences bouncing beach balls when loading applications.
-OS X 10.9.5 -Processor 266 GHz -Memory 2GB 1076MHz -240GB Free out of 319 GB
A while back I "upgraded" to Yosemite and noticed my system ran slower and some web pages wouldn't load. I had Mountain Lion with less issues and less pinwheels. I went to YO to improve the slow loading but I now feel it is worse.
Should I return to ML or work out issues with YO? I've talked with a AppleRep a month back and did a PRAM reset and disc repair..My modem and router have been replaced without any notice in improvement.
I'm a graphics professional taking the plunge into a Mac Pro. After some research, this is my notional drive setup:??GB SSD Boot Drive in the optical bay2 x 1TB 7200rpm SATA in RAID0, partitioned for 1.Data and 2.Scratch (therefore <2TB data)I obviously need to make sure that RAID0 is safely backed up. I've got an online backup service in case my house burns down and I'll be backing up individual projects onto optical media, but I will of course want to Time Machine the Data partition of the RAID.Now, for that Time machine drive I can either create another RAID0 from the same kind of drives (with the risk that entails), or for about the same money get a 2TB 5400rpm (leaving a drive bay free for future use, possibly another backup).
System Spec: Late 09 21" 3.06, GeForce 9400, 4gb ramCurrently I have itunes and safari running, if i enable the visualizer my imac is noticeably slower, especially when browsing the internet.I thought it might be the fact I was running a second 1080p display from the 9400 would have caused the slow down. But the same thing occurred after i disconnected it. After repairing permissions and restarting, pmram etc.Is the 9400 causing the slowdown? I know its fairly old but itunes visualizer and safari should be quite basic tasks. Its not the end of the world i know but does the 27" imac have similar issues as i plan to upgrade my machine in 2011.
Got my new iMac 27" i7 2.93 for three weeks ago. Everything was kind of fine but now everytime i boot it starts to write to the disk, and since you really can hear when the machine writes to the disk, it's obvious when it does it. The disk is a WDC WD1001FALS-40Y6A0
- I turned of spotlight indexing, rebooted, 30 minutes later it was still writing like there was no tomorrow.
- Checked Console.app, just Google Chrome trowing messages (which is running slower then on my old MBP Santa Rosa 5400 rpm).
- Ran disk utilty repair permissions, still no luck.
- Used Lingon to get rid of **** at startup, still no luck.
- No disk encryption.
The bottom line: The machine runs slower, boots applications slower and functions slower then my old MBP 2.4 ghz Santa Rosa 2007 with a 5400 rpm hdd. I tried to run a blu ray mkv from the internal disk, stuttered as hell and didn't work despite VLC being the only open application. Then i ran it from an external 5400 rpm Firewire drive and it worked flawlessy. What is up with this? Shall i reinstall and empty my disk?
Is there any software for checking what applications is currently writing to the HDD?
I bought a new Hitachi 1tb bare drive and have been trying to format it through Disk Utility. I have it connected to my iMac system using a Newertech USB 2.0 drive connector.The new drive appears in Disk Utility, and when I go through the "Erase" tab and set if up as Journaled - the system seems to go into formatting mode for about ten minutes and then I get an error and I have to Force Quit the Disk Utility.
I bought this in sept. of 08. The 24'' 2.8 ghz interl core 2 duoMy mac came with 2gig 800 hmz DDR2 SDRAM. what are good places to upgrade to 4 gigs. I have $200 in amazon gift cards, so that seem to be the front running. Do I need a certain brand or will any brand work as long as its ddr2 sdram?
I have been having some problems with my MacBook Pro going slower and slower and then eventually grinds to a halt. I'm not sure what is causing it....Is there a log that will show me any memory leaks or at least what was using up the most memory/CPU at the time it freezes? a lot of times it freezes awhile after the screensaver kicks in.
