How I solved my slow iMac with a constantly working hard-drive
A couple of days ago, I blogged about solving a problem that made my iMac very slow. At that time, I wasn’t sure if I had actually solved the problem. I can now say that I have.
My 27″ iMac has been slow since I got it. The disk has been writing constantly, especially when starting and waking up, but also when being idle.
When the hard drive was reading and writing like crazy, the iMac went into slow motion.
For info, I use OSX 10.6.7 and have a BootCamp partition on which I run Windows 7.
Neither the retailer, the service provider nor Apple Support were able to figure out why the computer was acting this way. They didn’t even confirm the slow behavior. They probably just ran Disk Utility, and actually even managed to scratch the computer when doing this.
I however finally managed to solve the problem and end 6 months daily frustrations. To help others, I sent this to some of colleagues and instantly received a bunch of responses from equally frustrated colleagues who confirmed that it worked.
The problem (discussed here) turned out to be that Spotlight tries to index the BootCamp partition, without being able to write to it. When it fails to write, it tries again, and again…
The solution is to add the BootCamp partition to the Spotlight ignore list. When I did, the problems stopped immediately and my iMac is now lightning fast.
You may need to re-add this ignore rule after rebooting (I had to do it once) and maybe add a file to the BootCamp root, but once you have, you will be in a world of speed.
If you have the same problem, I hope this helps.
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