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Post by siggie on Jan 7, 2018 14:40:30 GMT -5
Hi, I have a 21.5" iMac (late 2013 model) with a 1TB standard hard drive and 8 gb of RAM. I am getting the spinning beach ball of death more and more frequently when multiple programs are open (some combination of Finder, Word, PDF Expert, Chrome, and Safari usually). I suspect it is the hard drive. The computer gets used for web surfing, legal work (Word and PDF readers/editors), and school work (google docs), so not too intense. Is there a good way for me to diagnose the problem? If it is the hard drive, any opinions on this replacement: eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/YIMAC212Y1.0/I just want to get a few more years out of my current machine. Thanks in advance, siggie |
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Post by siggie on Jan 7, 2018 14:49:44 GMT -5
Forgot a question. This is the shortest time a hard drive has lasted for me. I have been synching my home computer's hard drive with my office's dropbox account for the last few years. Is this a likely cause of the decreased life of the drive?
siggie
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Post by novisnick on Jan 7, 2018 15:57:19 GMT -5
Sounds like a shortage of memory to me.
YMMV
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Post by creimes on Jan 7, 2018 16:12:19 GMT -5
Apple likes to slow down their devices to make you spend another couple grand haha, my Mini even with 8gb of ram and a SSD drive is still a dog. I fee every time I did the "Free" OS upgrade it decreased the speed of the Mini by about 20%.
You could try a SSD drive, it heped my Mini a bit and works wonders in my desktop PC
Chad
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Post by siggie on Jan 7, 2018 16:28:14 GMT -5
Apple likes to slow down their devices to make you spend another couple grand haha, my Mini even with 8gb of ram and a SSD drive is still a dog. I fee every time I did the "Free" OS upgrade it decreased the speed of the Mini by about 20%. You could try a SSD drive, it heped my Mini a bit and works wonders in my desktop PC Chad Chad, I hear you, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to do that, but I have a 2012 Mac Mini with a traditional hard drive in my office that sees heavy use, and it is still as fast as new. (I put in 16 gigs of RAM when I bought it, so that can't hurt.) I just don't want to put the $300 for a solid state drive (I need at least 1 TB) or $150 for more RAM into my older machine. siggie |
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Post by siggie on Jan 7, 2018 16:31:13 GMT -5
Sounds like a shortage of memory to me. YMMV Nick, Given my not so intensive use and my research indicating that 8 gigs of RAM is the sweet spot these days, I'm thinking it is not lack of RAM. siggie |
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Post by creimes on Jan 7, 2018 16:31:54 GMT -5
Apple likes to slow down their devices to make you spend another couple grand haha, my Mini even with 8gb of ram and a SSD drive is still a dog. I fee every time I did the "Free" OS upgrade it decreased the speed of the Mini by about 20%. You could try a SSD drive, it heped my Mini a bit and works wonders in my desktop PC Chad Chad, I hear you, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to do that, but I have a 2012 Mac Mini with a traditional hard drive in my office that sees heavy use, and it is still as fast as new. (I put in 16 gigs of RAM when I bought it, so that can't hurt.) I just don't want to put the $300 for a solid state drive (I need at least 1 TB) or $150 for more RAM into my older machine. siggie I only run a 120gb SSD and everything else is external, my itunes and iphoto library are on an external drive and my time machine is mirrored onto two drives in an external enclosure |
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 7, 2018 16:40:41 GMT -5
+1 for OMC!
I’ve bought their kits before and they’re excellent.
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Post by siggie on Jan 7, 2018 16:44:02 GMT -5
I only run a 120gb SSD and everything else is external, my itunes and iphoto library are on an external drive and my time machine is mirrored onto two drives in an external enclosure Intriguing. Is it difficult to set up an external drive to use as storage, and which model do you recommend? I'm not afraid to take my computer apart and install components, but I'm weak on the configuration side! siggie |
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Post by novisnick on Jan 7, 2018 16:45:28 GMT -5
Sounds like a shortage of memory to me. YMMV Nick, Given my not so intensive use and my research indicating that 8 gigs of RAM is the sweet spot these days, I'm thinking it is not lack of RAM. siggie Okey Dokey!. |
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Post by novisnick on Jan 7, 2018 17:09:38 GMT -5
I run an external hard drive to my Mac Mini and use it for my music files. Access through JRiver. Works quickly and accurately.
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Post by creimes on Jan 7, 2018 18:20:15 GMT -5
I only run a 120gb SSD and everything else is external, my itunes and iphoto library are on an external drive and my time machine is mirrored onto two drives in an external enclosure Intriguing. Is it difficult to set up an external drive to use as storage, and which model do you recommend? I'm not afraid to take my computer apart and install components, but I'm weak on the configuration side! siggie Connecting external drives is easy, usually there are Mac specific ones which I assume are just formatted correctly, I've had Seagate and Western Digital both fail on me in the past year so I recommend having a backup drive as well, like I mentioned I have two drives mirrored in a external case that I put together. I use this one www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX40154 with two 2tb drives mirrored having the same data on both in case one fails. A few days ago my 4tb WD external storage at my Windows PC bit the dust and I lost a lot of photos and I'm really not happy about it, I thought I had them on another drive but I can't find them so I'm looking hard at a 4 bay NAS to store photos, music and movies on, I would like to do two separate Raid 1 for storage, the issue is the cheapest decent 4 bay NAS I can find is $389 and then I need to put hard drives in it and two 2tb NAS drives or enterprise drives are about $170 each and then another two 4tb or 6tb drives are another $200 each or more. But NAS looks like the way to go if I want to try and minimize loss the best I can but yikes it's expensive. The wifes and mine Android phones both backup the photos to google so that helps as I lost 10 months of photos last year when my SD card bit it. Chad |
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Post by pknaz on Jan 7, 2018 20:43:06 GMT -5
Synology's are awesome devices, highly recommend them. (External storage that is network capable so all your devices can share it). +1 on the SSD & external drive, just make sure you have a backup of your data in another location - TimeMachine makes this super easy, ESPECIALLY if you have an aforementioned Synology  |
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Post by siggie on Jan 8, 2018 8:06:14 GMT -5
Thanks all. I’ll let you know how things go.
siggie
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