Do you have a Mac that beach balls (colourful pinwheels that produce colourful language) for 30-60 seconds at a time when you’re not running a computationally intensive task? Your hard drive could be dying. I hope you’re backing up. But I’m not writing this blog post to convince you that backing up your data regularly is a good idea (but it is, though). Instead, I’m going to show you how to see if that is indeed what is causing the beach balling and, if so, how to keep on tempting fate by keeping your failing hard drive chugging along while reducing your unwanted trips to the beach ((Is it any wonder why computer scientists tend to be so pasty?))
Musings of a happy scientist