iMac "Color Wheels" Despite Tons of Free CPU & Memory

Before you do ANYTHING PLEASE BACKUP UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Your HD may be failing, it is reports 41 errors! Please restart the computer in the Recovery Partition (Command + R) and open Disk Utility and try Repair Disk, if it reports errors, then run it again up to 3x, if errors are still being reported take the machine in for repair.

Those wheels are probably occurring because your machine is doing a lot of disk activity. Using the drives is something that fully uses the CPU, and it does not multi-task.

Maybe you should try getting rid or uTorrent and Spotify or stop using the computer until it finishes re-indexing your drives. See if that helps any.

There is nothing in your Etrecheck report that's indicative of slowing down the computer. If there is something causing the problem you won't find it in that report.

If the computer shipped with an Apple Fusion type of combination

SSD and HDD, they may be logically separated. Or if there are two

drives, an SSD and HDD in the computer, there may be a problem

with a cable or perhaps component failure, such as a storage drive.

Any odd 'free-download' software or torrent items aren't helpful.

In any event, the situation is a candidate for professional diagnostic tests.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

Back everything up first is right. 41 errors on a drive isn't that bad if it's recoverable but you may need to reformat and zero the drive to get any bad blocks to remap, and that would also mean repartitioning it in Terminal.app to be a Fusion drive - I'm assuming it's a Fusion Drive. If doing that sort of thing is over your head you might consider taking it to Apple and let them do the work for you.

If you think this isn't related to the hard drive you could look at this link about drive problems:

Hard Drive Problems

The company that wrote that article makes a product named Scannerz which can test a Fusion Drive by component, but in your case I don't know what merit there would be in using it because you're already showing errors. However, it the beach balling cold still have other causes and maybe the article will help you.

Etrecheck frequently reports disk errors that are non-existent, so you can't be sure they mean anything. I don't know what the software is doing, but it's more often wrong than right. Just thought i'd pass this on having made these same remarks several weeks/months back and being proved wrong.

When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

@Kappy:

I'm pretty new to this site and saw lots of people post info from EtreCheck, so I just assumed what it was reporting was right, so I guess I've already learned something new, yet again. 😉

The startup drive is failing, or there is some other internal hardware fault.

Back up all data on the drive immediately if you don't already have a current backup. There are ways to back up a computer that isn't fully functional—ask if you need guidance.

Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store, or go to another authorized service provider.

If privacy is a concern, erase the data partition(s) with the option to write zeros* (do this only if you have at least two complete, independent backups, and you know how to restore to an empty drive from any of them.) Don’t erase the recovery partition, if present.

Keeping your confidential data secure during hardware repair

Apple also recommends that you deauthorize a device in the iTunes Store before having it serviced.

*An SSD doesn't need to be zeroed.

For the sake of clarity the primary disk is an Apple SSD and the drive with the problems is an HDD. Unless they're separate Core Storage volumes this is configured as a Fusion Drive. If the HDD has only minimal bad sectors they could be re-mapped by zeroing the drive, but there's now way to tell from the EtreCheck output because all it says is "41 errors." The log indicates I/O errors, but I/O errors can be generated from a faulty cable as well.

Since the OP is taking the unit to Apple for servicing I'm sure the cause will be properly identified and dealt with there.

MrWilliams201 wrote:

there's now way to tell from the EtreCheck output because all it says is "41 errors." The log indicates I/O errors, but I/O errors can be generated from a faulty cable as well.

That is al that it knows. It just reads the log files and looks for kernel I/O errors and returns how many it finds.

@etresoft:

Thanks for the explanation. Nice package as well. 🙂