Perhaps you should also consider some troubleshooting or look into
the cause behind this kind of issue; the system appears to hang up
at various times.~ This may indicate the hard drive is getting fuller to
a point that maybe it's looking for places to store & retrieve stuff so
the time is spent trying to re-shuffle the deck, so to speak...
And also the file system or OS may be having issues; maybe due to
some software you may have installed does not play well with others.
You could start up in Safe mode, this checks/fixes some system files
while it's in use, and also is helpful as troubleshooting venture. And
once you're done, restart normally...
•Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac - Apple Support
Check system logs & see what kind of activity it reports; this may not
be an easy task because so much of that is hard to understand. From
the System Information (a profile of the OS X) you could see quite a bit.
Go from the Apple icon in Finder, see 'About this Mac' then go click to
look into 'more info' from there; which should open the system profile.
Also Disk Utility can help approximate the amount of used vs. free/unused
hard drive capacities; a too full storage drive would mean the System that
also uses this for temporary swap files and virtual memory, would seek to
find places for those files and take longer in so doing essential tasks.
To locate the MacHD icon and use Get Info to see the comparative total
of content stored that way verses the capacity of the formatted hard drive
is also another way to view these numbers. ~ Sometimes later versions of
Disk Utility show more bits, pieces, & colored graphics. 'Plain' percentages
where you can tell at a glance, is more helpful. The Mac OS X automatically
uses any free or previously unused capacity for its purposes.
Perhaps to get and use an external hard drive for backups; large enough
to partition for storage too, so you could remove excess from the Mac HD?
{..So, now I have to go out & shovel again... only 5 to 8 inches add'l expected..}
At least the roof isn't critical just yet; that's a major walkabout, to carry shovel
fulls to where I won't have to re-shovel and carry once back on the ground.
Gravity tends to make any shovelful once tossed down only about 5x heavier.
once the air is gone the compressed packed snow is more difficult to move...
So far the shoveling season is still early; between now and May we can get tons
more. Or a half ton along with several feet of rain; that makes for failing roofs.
In any event...
Good luck & happy computing! 🙂
