Sporadic hangups and lagging on macbook pro.

I have a late 08 unibody macbook pro with a 2.4ghz core 2 duo. I upgraded the ram from 2gb to 8gb and the hard drive from the original 5400rpm 250gb to a 500gb 5400rpm hitachi deskstar (aka deathstar).

When I first put in the new hard drive everything was okay, no noticeable speed decreases. I ran it for about a year and installed Lion recently and everything was still okay.

But during these past two weeks I've noticed that the computer has becoming gradually slower opening large files. And just in general when browsing through finder. Editing 1920x1080 video files straight from my 7D in Final Cut have also been a nightmare. If I have itunes playing in the background while editing pictures in lightroom the music will stop and I will get the beach ball for about 2 seconds. Editing just 8mp jpegs have become impossible in lightroom. Just a month ago I was editing 18mp raw files just fine.

I'm assuming its something with my hard drive. Even though it's not a fast drive I know it shouldn't be this slow. The disk permissions are good, and I have verified the disk and it is okay. When editing in lightroom with itunes in the background I have just over 5gb ram free so ram isn't the issue. Would getting a new (possibly faster) hdd solve my issues?

 

I know they don't happen on macs that often but have you used a program like ClamXav to scan your computer for a virus?

Also Apple has a utility to check the hard drive. Go to Applications then Utilities then disk utility. I think you can use that to scan your hard drive. It should do a preliminary check. If it comes up with something then its definitely your hard drive. Otherwise it might be something else.

Whoops I guess you already did that. Like I said though it might be a virus that is the kind of slowdown you sometimes get from a virus.

 

Use Onyx to check the SMART attributes of the hard drive. Let us know if it has any problems.

 

^ That is what I would do. SMART is more in-depth than OS X's Disk Utility. A faster hard drive wouldn't really solve your issues especially since I highly doubt you are going to notice a difference between a 5400RPM and 7200RPM drive (I know I didn't, I think it shaved 1-2 seconds off of my 40 second boot time, big whoopydoo). However, a newer hard drive may solve your issues if there is something physically wrong with your current one.

Out of curiosity, did you upgrade to OS X Lion or did you perform a clean install?

 

I upgraded to lion.

I used carbon copy cloner and moved everything to my original 250gb hdd and everything is much snappier now, like normal. SMART and other checks showed that my original 500gb drive was healthy, but something was clearly wrong.

I agree that I won't notice much of a difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm. Are the seagate hybrid drives worth it?