I recently connected a 1TB LaCie external drive wih a FireWire 800 connection to my iMac running Mountain Lion. It seems like I'm getting the spinning pinwheel of death a lot more often. What can be done to check out where the slow-down is occurring ? If it isn't the external drive, are ther ways of improving performance?
Thank you"
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion
Randy, how much ram do you have installed? Did you install any Lacie software on your Mac?
4GB RAM (that's the max on this) and yes I do have some LaCie software installed called LaCie Backup. I'd dump it in a heartbeat if I knew it was the cause of my slow-down. Photoshop is doing some dreadfully slow work now, which is what concerns me most.
4gb is really the minimum for running Mountian Lion, then trying to do some heavy work in PhotoShop might be a bit ambitious. Take a look at this page regarding using Activity Monitor to see what's going on. When you start Activity Monitor use your Mac normally and pay attention to page in and page outs.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
Another thought....how much free space do you have on your internal hard drive? If you are using the external for backup why not use Time Machine?
Thanks, Mike. Very Helpful. Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but that's computer life. I like your recommendations and I will check out time machine. I've also began deleting files that should have been deleted a long time ago. I think I might need a file hoarder support group! ;-)
I'm bad about hoarding myself. Take a look using Activity Monitor, it really gives you a good look at what your ram situation is, along with several other things.
Can an external drive slow down performance?
