Time Machine Issues and Intermittent Freezing

[jordanm86]

Hey Guys, i'm in need of some advice

So, as the title states, I have been having some major Time Machine issues and intermittent freezing on my Late 2008 (unibody) MacBook Pro (15", 2.53Ghz, 8GB RAM).

I'm pretty sure all of these issues occurred after updating to 10.8.5.

Firstly, the Time Machine thing:
I'm using a WD MyBook Studio II and have had it for around 3 years with no problems (connected over Firewire 800).

Since the last update it won't back up - it will fail/unmount the drive mid way/move at a snails' pace (e.g. 20-30kb a minute).

I read posts on various sites of people experiencing similar problems - I followed all the instructions (reset NVRAM/PRAM, disable Spotlight on External Drive, rebuild spotlight, repair disk permissions) and eventaully formatted the drive. It is now backing up but still very slow (about 1MB in the last 10 mins) - it is doing a deep traversal but it's saying 1,187 days remaining and quite frankly, the machine will probably be dead by then!

Secondly, Intermittent Freezing
This issue either occurred after the 10.8.5 update or after updating to 1Password 4. The machine will occasionally freeze... no spinning wheel, no weird screen glitches, just literally hangs for a second or two and then continues like nothing happened. It seems to be worse in certain apps (Adobe Photoshop CS6, iTunes, Adobe Illustrator CC and Mail).

I have disabled 1 password from running in the task bar and it seems to happen less frequently, though it still happens on occasion. Page outs are at 0, no S.M.A.R.T warnings from the HD so not really sure what else it could be

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

 

[satcomer]

Sometime mechanical hard drives die like old Hollywood style films, painfully slow.

Did you try to boot into Recovery Mode and try to use Disk Utility in that mode to repair the disk. Then think about replacing that disk before the upcoming OS X release (10.9).

 

[jordanm86]

Ah ok, I did wonder if that was the case :-(

To be fair, it is 5 years old... I am waiting until Tuesday to see what the cost of the Mac Pro is against a maxed out 27" iMac... though I imagine the Mac Pro will be out of my price range

Once I have that machine set up as my main work machine, I am planning on changing the battery and put an SSD in the MBP to try and squeeze another couple of years from it :-D

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

Open Console. Filter: i/o

If multiple entries appear, you've got a failing hard drive.