Frustrating system hangs/hard drive thrashing

[blppt]

This has been a problem for me even since installing 10.6 close to two years ago, and has persisted through Lion. Basically, what happens is that for whatever reason, the hard drive light goes near solid, which would seem to indicate excessive hard drive usage, and the system becomes unresponsive for close to 3 minutes...the mouse works fine, but anything you click on wont load/respond until the system unfreezes, resulting in the spinning beach ball. This happens several times throughout the day with normal uses. Unfortunately, this also means I cannot open activity monitor or the console at the exact time this is happening to see what the problem is, and afterwards, the only thing logged in the console around the date/time it occurs is that stupid adobe flash error (which also shows up at other times when the system doesnt freeze, and this can occur at startup before any program that uses flash is loaded, so I dont think this is related).

I have already disabled spotlight using both the mdutil command and excluding everything in the system configuration/spotlight panel, so I dont *think* it could be that, and this hard disk works fine under windows using MacDrive, so I dont *think* its a hardware failure.

I have already reinstalled SL through Lion from scratch as well. I have also changed motherboards from a GA-EP45-UD3LR to GA-EP55-UD3L (DSDT) to an ASUS sandy bridge Z68 (easybeast only), and all exhibit the same problem.

This also does not occur at all on my PowerMac G5 quad with 10.5.8, so this is not just "how macs normally work" I suppose.

Does anybody else ever notice this behavior?

 

[karacho]

Please read -> faq.php

 

[blppt]

I assume you were referring me to the specs section of the faq? Theres really only one common piece of hardware between the 3 setups I listed, and thats the hard disk, which is a Western Digital Caviar Green 640GB (SATA), a drive that has no such issues in Windows using MacDrive 8.

At this very moment, I'm running the GA-EP55-UD3L with a Core i7-860 with UserDSDT and 16GB DDR3. No overclocking, etc. I didnt really list specs because this problem has persisted with any of the three mobo/cpu combinations, so that rules them out, IMHO. Cant be networking as the Sandy Bridge mobo has an Intel Ethernet controller and the other two are different models of Realteks (81xx). EasyBeast or UserDSDT has also made no difference. I have tried both a USB soundcard and the various onboard realtek's.

Just wondering whether anybody has ever come across this kind of behavior on their setups...

 

[blppt]

NM, I put in a cheap SSD, and the problem is finally gone. Just wish I could have figured out what was wrong with that drive under OSX...it worked fine in Windows.

 

[samisnake]

im sure ive read on here about similar stories happening with those green drives.
something to do with them putting themselves to sleep, but osx not being able to wake them up properly or something to that effect.

 

[powerpcg5]

Does anybody else ever notice this behavior?

Yup. On an original 27" iMac. Beach Ball Hell.

BAD hard drive.

 

[karacho]

Yup. On an original 27" iMac. Beach Ball Hell.

BAD hard drive.

im sure ive read on here about similar stories happening with those green drives.
something to do with them putting themselves to sleep, but osx not being able to wake them up properly or something to that effect.

If it's so, did you guys tried that in System Preferences->Energy Saver? (uncheck Sleep for HDD's)

 

[blppt]

IIRC, the thing about the "Green" WDC drives is that they spool down to 5400rpm when not under extreme load, and normally run at 7200rpm. And I had energy saver disabled...the system was never put to sleep.

It wouldnt shock me if there was some sort of power saving feature on the drive controller beyond the 5400/7200 switch that OSX had a problem with..for example, with the SSD as my boot drive now (e.g. all the macOS files) and the Green drive hooked up as a data drive (games, movies, etc), the behavior does not return.

It MUST be something that only occurs when the WD Green drive is used as the system/boot drive, b/c nothing else I tried over the years solved this problem, but as soon as I SuperDuper'd the mac system drive (originally the WD Green) to the new cheap SSD (and reinstalled Chimera), all was well.

Just really odd that this issue never came up in Windows. If it had, I would have immediately suspected the HD was the culprit.

 

[powerpcg5]

If it's so, did you guys tried that in System Preferences->Energy Saver? (uncheck Sleep for HDD's)

It was a bad hard drive. No "software setting" could fix it. It was very frustrating finding the cause of the problem because the computer "still works"... it's not like a DEAD hard drive. You wouldn't have suspected the hard drive. But it is the hard drive.

Booting the iMac off an external USB drive fixed all the beach ball and "freeze" problems.