Finder Stopped Responding

[revron08]

Lately, I have episodes of all functions on my computer freezing, or greatly lagging, then catching up all at once. My finder has stopped responding on multiple occasions, and will allow it to force quit, but does not start back up on its own, or at all. Also, restarting the computer can take as long as 20 minutes. If anyone has insight, I would greatly appreciate it.

I have a 2013 Mac Pro Trashcan 3.5Ghz 6 core E5 with 64GB Ram running Big Sur.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Normally, that is a sign of very low free disk space, a hard drive starting to fail, or some software like a third-party utility or antivirus affecting things.

Check those and let us know and we'll go from there.

C

 

[revron08]

I have about 10% of my system drive free. It's been like that since I've had this computer, but these symptoms are recent. The drive is an SSD, but I imagine those can fail as well. I don't have any antivirus, but I did recently install Dropbox desktop app. I can't remember if these two things coincide time-wise, and I can't uninstall dropbox until I finish a current project.

Is there a way I can check drive health?

 

[TonyAguila]

I have about 10% of my system drive free. It's been like that since I've had this computer, but these symptoms are recent. The drive is an SSD, but I imagine those can fail as well. I don't have any antivirus, but I did recently install Dropbox desktop app. I can't remember if these two things coincide time-wise, and I can't uninstall dropbox until I finish a current project.

Is there a way I can check drive health?

If you can familiarize yourself with Dropbox from your web browser, you might feel more comfortable working with it without using your local drive. I have had serious problems with Dropbox recently and switched to iCloud and OneDrive. However, I still share files with a number of clients over Dropbox, so I just go with the web browser route.

You don’t have to delete Dropbox right away, just turn it off and see if your system runs better without it. You can also try reinstalling macOS. And if you are on macOS Monterey or Big Sur, 10% free space on your startup drive is hardly enough. I get nervous when my free space goes below 50%. Maybe you can get an external drive to store some of your data on it to free up space on the internal drive.

To keep tabs on the health of my drives, I rely mainly on Disk Utility and DriveDX.