Rotating Color Ball Hangups ?

[Robert11]

Hello,

Have an imac desktop of several years age.

Have been getting, apparently at random, that rotating
colorful ball that locks everything up. Seems more often now.

So, may I please ask:

What causes, and anything I can check out or correct to minimize its appearing ?
Have an imac desktop, with, I believe, the typical mechanical platter HD.
Not too thrilled about adding a external SSD, but maybe.

Is it usually something very specific, or a "general" type of error, e.g., the HD slowing, or going bad, or... ?


**What's a "typical" life span for these desktops ?

What usually goes first: the HD, or...?

Any thoughts or suggestions most appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

 

[TonyAguila]

Hello,

Have an imac desktop of several years age.

Have been getting, apparently at random, that rotating
colorful ball that locks everything up. Seems more often now.

So, may I please ask:

What causes, and anything I can check out or correct to minimize its appearing ?
Have an imac desktop, with, I believe, the typical mechanical platter HD.
Not too thrilled about adding a external SSD, but maybe.

Is it usually something very specific, or a "general" type of error, e.g., the HD slowing, or going bad, or... ?


**What's a "typical" life span for these desktops ?

What usually goes first: the HD, or...?

Any thoughts or suggestions most appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

A more familiar term is “beach balling.” The cause can be a number of conditions and never easy to pinpoint. A freeware utility, EtreCheck, has a section on diagnosing beach balling, but I never personally found it to be very effective at pinpointing the problem. The cause is mostly wear and tear of files from errors caused by numerous reads and writes, and the most effective solution I found is to reinstall (or upgrade/update) macOS, with the usual caveat of having reliable backups prior to such operations.

For your other queries, for the majority of my clients who started out with Macs with mechanical hard drives, the most practical and least painful upgrade was always the addition of an external SSD and using the internal drive as additional storage which could also have an installed system as backup.

Personally, my best choice is the backup/macOS reinstall/update route. I do it routinely, well before problems become apparent. It also helps a lot to provide your Mac’s model identifier when reporting issues of this sort.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

What is the capacity of the HDD?
How much free space on the HDD.?
How much RAM is installed?