Mac Pro 8 Core slow to lookup Hard Drives

Hi All,

I'm running a 2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro tower. With 10 GB's of RAM.

We have all 4 hard drive bays full, along with a 4tb RAID 5 external box that is connected via eSata 95% of the time, this box starts and powers down with the system. We also have one or two external drives that we connect via eSata and Firewire 800 (usually the former unless we really need to connect via FW800).

I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard about a month or so ago and have been experiencing issues ever since with regards to lookup speed. While it wasn't an issue in the past, now it seems as though the system is struggling at time to simply open a file, or at worse it will beach ball when after I've clicked on 'open file', before any window opens.

I did a fresh install on our Mac HD, our main drive that holds all the system stuff (apps, startup, etc). But left the rest the same, and re-installed all our software.

I've done a permissions repair. I've looked up the activity, we only have 1 powerpc task running and thats a RAID5daemon that I'm hesitant to remove as I get the feeling it has a large part to play with the RAID5 box we have running.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions? The Mac HD's capacity is 700 GB's, and currently it has 510GB's available.

Any help would be huge!!

Thanks!
Scott

I would run Permissions on all drives and then follow it up with Disk Verify just so you know the "condition" of the attached drives. Struggling to open a file suggests you should see something on Verify Disk. How do you back up a beast like this?

Perhaps someone else may know - maybe OS X Server may be a better choice of OS.

Not a favourite of upgrading. If your problem continues, back up Leopard, wipe that drive and do a clean install.

harryb2448 said:

Not a favourite of upgrading. If your problem continues, back up Leopard, wipe that drive and do a clean install.

Click to expand...

Sorry if I was a bit confusing. When I installed Leopard I did the option that wipes the drive completely and then does a fresh install of Leopard. So I didn't technically 'upgrade' as I think you meant.

I'll take a look into OS X Server, and check all drives, thanks!

If anyone else has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Have the same thing on my systems since I don't mind waiting a few extra minutes if I haven't been using a particular drive in a while and its better for the drive. What it actually is is the OS shutting down drives that are not being used and your computer waiting for it to spin up after you have called for something from it.

I believe you can prevent this from happening in the power settings.

PowerBookG4, you are 100% on point. I checked out the power settings and found that checkbox that had been checked off putting the hard drives to sleep whenever possible, I can only assume that reset itself in the Leopard install.

Many thanks!!