2012 Mac Mini getting annoyingly slow.

[Onamuji]

Filliam H. Muffman wrote: My experience is that SMART Utility gives the best info when you pay attention to it and will usually only give a clear warning in a period of about 72 hours before it completely fails.

With the default settings, SMART Utility will mark a drive with a yellow FAILING alert for a single bad sector.

The Disk Utility won't mark a drive as failing until it's a doorstop.

[Lew Zealand]

Open Activity Monitor.
Select All Processes from the View menu, if not already selected.
Look for anything using more than 10% of your CPU.

As an example on my dual core i7 NUC (think: Hack Mini), this web page in Safari is taking less than 2% cpu while I'm typing and everything else is taking less than that (no major programs running, just OS processes and a number of shareware utilities). All well-behaved.

You may see a process taking up a lot of CPU (I get powerd up to 99% on occasion, this is an Apple bug). And some web pages stink. Tom's Hardware uses 99% of CPU in Safari and FFox for me just doing nothing after everything has loaded so something's broken there. That'll kill your laptop battery, if nothing else.

Now to your disk.

Click the Disk tab in Activity Monitor.
In the graph in the bottom, click IO and select Data.
Right click anywhere in the header where it says Process Name or Bytes Written and select %CPU
Drag %CPU to the right of Process Name

Now you can view what's happening to your disk and CPU at the same time because the problem will probably be traceable using one of these 2 things. Your disk shouldn't be doing much unless you are copying files around or using an app like Photoshop, which uses the disk as a cache.

A laptop HDD in a Mac Mini tops out at 100MB/sec on optimal transfers but can do 20-40MB/sec regularly. If you see a lot of that, then something is doing things in the background, look at the Bytes Written and Bytes Read totals to see what's doing that.

Conversely, when you do something on your computer and it's not responding properly, see if there's any data being transferred to or from the disk. If you're opening a program and the disk is sitting there doing nothing for a while, like 50 KB/sec or even just 1 MB/sec, the problem is the disk.

[modelamac]

wurm,

First things to do now is run Malware Bytes and Detect X. Then check with Activity Monitor to see what is consuming CPU cycles.

The Mac should not slow down unless something has changed. You need to find out what changed. Anti-malware running in background?

[Speedy]

My fav is DiskWarrior.

[GuyGene]

Well, it'll be interesting to learn what causes this. I too say go ahead and get SSD.

[space-time]

Filliam H. Muffman wrote:
.

wurm, try booting with your backup drive to see if it has the same problem


[quote=space-time]
Classical symptom of a bad hard drive.

I expect SMART Utility will indicate a failing drive.

I doubt it will. If wurm had made a chart of the number of bad sectors over the last year, my guess is it would have been steadily going up and is now going up faster. My experience is that SMART Utility gives the best info when you pay attention to it and will usually only give a clear warning in a period of about 72 hours before it completely fails.

I am not sure if you agree or disagree with me here, because my guess is that the disk has bad sectors, and SMART Utility will indicate as "Failing".

I have seen exactly this effect on a super slow MBP, lots of failing sectors and sometimes reading errors. I put in an SSD and new OS and it is zippy now. Will return it today to my friend.

[wurm]

Well, I finally got around to following up a bit. Thanks for all the suggestions.

• I ran Malware bytes. It didn't find anything.
• Downloaded and ran SMART Utility. Hard drive Passed. (Beyond that, I'm not sure what I'm looking for it to tell me and how to interpret the info.)
• Downloaded and ran DetectX. It found some Application Support/Google/Chrome/External Extensions, but I rarely if ever use Chrome, so I'm not sure what that's all about. I have the option to Trash All, but again, I'm not sure what they do and therefore whether I should trash them.

The only thing showing more than 10% usage in Activity Monitor is Firefox, and even that varies from just under 10% to up to 14% or so, even when it's just parked on the forum page.

I'm not prepared to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for an SSD just to speed things up. I remember the old days of "disk optimization". Is that even a factor anymore?

[jdc]

fwiw, SSDs are not a couple of hundred bucks... maybe $110 for 500 GB if you watch for a sale.

Did you say *when* it it was acting slow? Not sure I saw that.

what happens with a new user account? or in safe mode.

[wurm]

Well, a quick look on the OWC site showed a 240GB for $110 and a 500GB for $198 (sale prices). I'm not saying I couldn't find one cheaper, but I don't think I should have to shell out any more money when its speed had been fine for my purposes up until fairly recently.

I'll have to try to track when it seems to slow down specifically, but it seems in general that when I launch anything from the dock, it takes several bounces for the program to open, compared to the one or two bounces before.

Also, there was an issue with Netflix, where it seemed that I couldn't even scroll down the page until it was all finished loading, which also seemed to take longer than usual.

I guess I should really try to pinpoint what I'm trying to do when I mostly notice the slowdown.

[jonny]

SSD.