something wrong with powerbook harddrive

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I don't know what the deal is with my hard drive, the powerbook is new, got it from apple store in August. but lately the computer has been slowing down. I copied a music file from itunes directory to desktop, it was 155mb (a mix) and it was only copying at 2mb/s. right now i'm importing the music file into Audacity, a music editor, and it's taking forever. using IPulse, it tells me that writing at 1mb/s and it's peak was 3mb/s, is there something wrong with my hard drive? I have SMARTreporter running and it's green. i also ran a battery of tests with Onyx, MacJanitor and MacSweeper. i don't k now what else to do.. maybe format the hard drive?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    everytime it slows down, i look at Ipulse, and my CPU usage is only around 20-40%, i have always atleast 500mb of free memory, total is 1.25gb. so thats not it.. and my hard drive writes/reads at around 1-3mb/s which isn't fast at all. wtf ?
  • Reply 2 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    so no one can help? my computer hasn't been slowing down that much recently, but the hard drive is still slow. i just copy and pasted a 225mb file and its taking over 3 minutes, checking IPulse disk activitiy, says that i'm writing at 2mb/s with a peak of 3mb/s



    doesn't this seem awfully slow? my hard drive is 5400rpm btw
  • Reply 3 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    It seems slow, but on the other hand, without a lot more info, there's not a lot any of us can do or recommend. :/ It could be pretty much anything at this point. I doubt that formatting the hard drive is going to help if it is a hardware issue, and if it's software, then there are easier ways than the burn and pillage approach of reformatting.



    I assume you first tried Disk Utility before mucking with the other tools, and maybe even a single-user boot with direct fsck check? Perhaps booting from the CD that came with it, to run the tools from there?
  • Reply 4 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    so the way i decribe it, is it slow ?





    and what can I do ? I ran everything i could. i guess i'll try running from the cd, maybe i should go to the apple store and see what they can do?
  • Reply 5 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Well it *might* be slow, or it might be that other applications are requiring the drive at the same time. How much RAM do you have? A small amount of RAM will force the OS to use the disk for virtual memory (which is normal, and it is quite good at), but it can interfere with other drive tasks, like copying files.
  • Reply 6 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    i have 1.25GB
  • Reply 7 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Oh well, never mind then.
  • Reply 8 of 12
    did you go into the disk utility to check the S.M.Å.R.T. status?
  • Reply 9 of 12
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    Yea, he did.



    The only thing I would recommend is to clear the caches using OnyX. Then restart twice. (Once to rebuild the cache, the other to use the hopefully fast system.) Oh yea, I would run the maintenance scripts after that too. It might be repetitive, but it might help and it just takes a little more time.
  • Reply 10 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    Well i think i figured out why my computer froze before when i was running an update for Peak4, it's a VISE installer, and so the first thing it does is searches my hard drive for the program to update. now this is the same thing that happens when i search for files with finder. it completely locks up my computer. so i think the problem is when my hard drive searches for files, and also the fact that it writes slow.

    I just don't know what to do
  • Reply 11 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    Well I give up. I booted up from the Apple CD and ran the extended hardware test, took about a half hour, and found no problems. I guess the only thing I can do is get an external hard drive, and put all my stuff there, if that doesn't fix it.. I guess i'll have to go to the apple store.

    Any suggestions?
  • Reply 12 of 12
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    I ran a series of tests on my hard drive with DriveTest. the results were fine, and showed that my hard drive is good. so i don't know what the problem is..



    here are the results



    http://www.mikeberlyand.com/tests.zip



    there are 4 images in the zip file, bar graphs. my computer is the red bar



    the graph compares my computer to other computers
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