Hi. Thanks for responding again. My question about interpreting the values shown for Disk Activity in the Activity Monitor relates directly to an issue I'm having w/ my audio recording application where as my song file gets more complex w/ added tracks and processing effects, imported sounds, etc., the app. begins to halt and proceeds in a very jerky manner w/ very uneven playback and w/ audio randomly dropping out. I contacted Tech Support for my audio app and they thought the problem might be with my hard drive speed, fragmentation or free drive space. So I was trying to nail down the source of the decreased performance. Before I answer your questions, let me just mention that in the audio app. there's a window called Performance Monitor (kind of similar to Activity Monitor but on a much simpler scale) and that shows a high overload for Hard Drive performance but CPU and RAM are not being taxed at all (according to Performance Monitor).
To address your questions.
S.M.A.R.T. status is verified in Disk Utility for my Hard Drive.
In Activity Monitor, CPU% is in the 90s but sometimes going as high as 107% for my audio app. My machine is a Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5.
I have 4.5 GB RAM. 3.20 GB is shown as free.
0 Page outs.
Free space on disk: 25 GB.
Yes, there is a repeating message in Console: ### Warning: Audio render: Preload segment not ready