Q: My iMac intermittently fails to recognize my desktop hard drives
I recently upgraded my iMac (mid 2010, OS 10.10.4) so that I can run Final Cut Pro X.
When I first tried to install the program with my old setup, it just didn't work. I was also having unrelated issues with TimeMachine backups not completing, my two LaCie desktop hard drives starting to run slow or not be recognized in Finder, and I was getting weird unresponsiveness on startup. So:
- I upgraded from 4GB to 16GB RAM
- I took the computer in for servicing; got a new internal hard drive (apparently the computer was running very hot and they assured me that they were able to fix that.)
- I got a 4TB G-Raid to use as a scratch disk and a 2TB G-Drive to run TimeMachine backups.
The setup works great when it works. But sometimes I try to open my Final Cut file on the G-Raid and can't access it; Finder itself may freeze on the spinning beach ball till I do a hard shutdown...
I can get the drives back -- through a combination of restarting the computer, ejecting the drives, and generally mucking about -- but obviously I don't want to have to do that, and this must be a sign of an underlying problem that should be addressed.
Note: I have my G-Raid partitioned into 2 2TB drives; and I also made the partitions after I copied on my media files (65GB) -- Could that be part of the problem? Should I take off all the files and reformat the drives?
But also disturbing: the current issues are not entirely dissimilar to what was happening before I made the upgrades -- before I even tried to install Final Cut X ... Now, since the servicing, I have TimeMachine scheduled to run once a night and it is generally successful, but there have still been two or three times when it did not work.
Any suggestions?
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4), mid 2010, Firewire 800
Posted on Aug 15, 2015 10:20 AM