New mac constantly beachballs

[geb724]

i am a new mac owner with a 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display purchased nov 2019. it has 16mb factory installed ram and a 1tb hdd. the hdd has about 200gb of free space. the other space is mostly data- music, videos and photos.

very often when i click to open a random program i get the beachball. no other programs are running. all i have open is google chrome. last night it started to beachball and i let it run while i went out. 2 hours later it was till running.

i thought by moving to mac from pc these types of issues would not happen.

any reasons as to why this is happening and more importantly what solutions are there?

 

[pigoo3]

Have you tried rebooting the iMac?

- Nick

 

[geb724]

yes. every time it beachballs i have to reboot in order to make it stop and hopefully open the program.

 

[MacInWin]

Try opening Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder and leave it running in the background. You can minimize it to the Dock to get it out of the way. Next time you get beachballing click on the AM icon and then look at the CPU tab to see what is running away. If you click on the column header for %CPU, it will sort to have them win order, so you can get the heavy hitter to the top.

You said you are new, but the machine is from 2018. Did you buy this used? The symptoms you describe are often a failing HD. Did it come with Apple Care beyond the default 1 year from purchase? If so, contact Apple to have them test the hardware to see if the drive needs replacement.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Download Etrecheck and run that. Select the "Beachballing" option and see what it has to say. You'll need to authorize it for full disk access.
EtreCheck

Edit: also take a look at the "beachballing" link in pigoo's signature for some tips. You may have some app loading on startup that is hanging up. Etrecheck is good at catching things like that also.

 

[geb724]

Try opening Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder and leave it running in the background. You can minimize it to the Dock to get it out of the way. Next time you get beachballing click on the AM icon and then look at the CPU tab to see what is running away. If you click on the column header for %CPU, it will sort to have them win order, so you can get the heavy hitter to the top.

You said you are new, but the machine is from 2018. Did you buy this used? The symptoms you describe are often a failing HD. Did it come with Apple Care beyond the default 1 year from purchase? If so, contact Apple to have them test the hardware to see if the drive needs replacement.

yes i bought it brand new from apple.com in November of 2018 so it is still under the 1 year warranty. if the problem persists i will take it to an apple store.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, doing the math, November 2018 to January 2020 is more than one year, but if you bought AppleCare+ for the two extra years you could be ok. If not, you can still ask them to check the unit, and sometimes, just sometimes, they will go the extra yard and fix things beyond the one year.

 

[geb724]

sorry about the purchase date. it was November 2019 not 2018.

 

[MacInWin]

Ah, then definitely take it to an Apple store for them to check. It should not be doing what you are seeing.

 

[pigoo3]

yes i bought it brand new from apple.com in November of 2018 so it is still under the 1 year warranty. if the problem persists i will take it to an apple store.

Definitely give everything suggested by Mac-Forums members a try first. If nothing helps...definitely take it to an Apple Store for an evaluation. As member MacInWin mentioned...many times this issue is a failing HD (if nothing else can be found to be the issue). With a computer this new...a failing HD would be a rarity...but as with anything...it's always possible.

FYI. Just in case you do need to take it to an Apple Store...probably a great idea to backup everything important first. If the drive needs to be replaced...the Apple techs will migrate everything from your old drive to the new drive...but they will also ask you if you backed everything up...since there is always the possibility data can be lost during a migration.

Since you have approximately 800 gig's of stuff on the drive...sounds like there may be at least some items needing backing up.

- Nick

 

[nickyr]

reading this and your other thread re Finder not working, it certainly sounds like your HDD is bad.

I'd try a couple of other things prior to returning to Apple though:

1. in the utilities folder, open Disc Utility and run first aid on your HDD
2. download and run Onyx

 

[ferrarr]

Is this a different thread than the other one? It seems like the drive is too full, offload some files to make more space?

 

[chscag]

He's posted the same question over at MacRumors and pretty much got the same answers that we have given him here:

1. Slow hard drive (5200 RPM)

2. Drive too full (around 75%)

3. Offload the video, photos, and music to an external drive.

4. Boot to safe mode to see if anything may be running in the background upon startup

 

[Randy B. Singer]

... 1tb hdd. the hdd has about 200gb of free space.

It is extremely likely that your hard drive is for all intents and purposes FULL. See:

OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
Item #5 and Note #1

Here is an entire Web page devoted to dealing with rotating beachball problems:
Macintosh OS X Beachballs!

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Agreed with the others about the drive being effectively full. A 5200 rpm drive quite honestly is a poor choice for today’s computers as the main system drive and being chock full of media fragments it quite a bit, putting more pressure on its performance. You should at the minimum move your videos to an external drive. If you get one using USB-C, it will have transfer rates as good as if it was an internal drive (a 5200 rpm drive is fine for this need). Maybe move the audio and photos too... depending on just how much space you need to recover. I use one myself just for storing media files.

 

[Rod]

I'm a bit unsure about this 200Gb free out of a Terabyte should be enough barring serious fragmentation although I'm impressed that a recent iMac purchase could have 800Gb of data on it so soon.
geb724, where did all this data come from? If it was from other storage it may be of unreliable quality or a difficult format for the macOS to handle or it may be still indexing it. Spotlight can take a while to index a large amount of data.

 

[gurucomputers]

It might be if your drive is full. Try to reboot it. Hopefully, it will help.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I'm a bit unsure about this 200Gb free out of a Terabyte should be enough barring serious fragmentation ...

Over the years I've seen a lot of hard drives that were full at about an indicated 80% full, no matter how big the drive was or how much actual space that 20% represented. (Assuming, of course, that the drive is a rotating disk hard drive formatted as HFS+.)

Yes, I've almost always gotten push-back when I have told the owner that their drive with many gigabytes reported of free space remaining is FULL. But clearing off space from the drive and defragmenting it has always been the solution.

The thing is that the Mac uses quite a bit of hard drive space for caches, databases, scratch space, virtual memory, etc. That "free space" isn't empty at all. It's being used, and it has most likely been used over and over. Once your Mac finds that last 20% of free space unavailable, especially if that space isn't contiguous, it is going to act flakier and flakier, until you start to experience data loss.

This isn't nearly as big a problem for SSD's. And very recent Macs use automatic storage management via iCloud to prevent this from being a problem.

 

[dtravis7]

I have a late 2012 iMac with a 1TB 5400 HDD. The drive is slow but not that bad up to a few months ago, but now the drive is dying and has bad sectors. I get beachballs no matter what I do due to the drive dying. On a Mac that new though I sure hope the drive is ok.

I agree, take it to apple.

I would have by now installed a new drive but my family and I were told to leave our house by the landlords and rents are so high we could not find anything. I am Safe with a new friend and will once I pay all the moving bills, get a new drive and the glue strips and make it fast again! Going to get an SSD. Tired of slow 2.5" 5400 drives!

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Over the years I've seen a lot of hard drives that were full at about an indicated 80% full, no matter how big the drive was or how much actual space that 20% represented. (Assuming, of course, that the drive is a rotating disk hard drive formatted as HFS+.)

Yes, I've almost always gotten push-back when I have told the owner that their drive with many gigabytes reported of free space remaining is FULL. But clearing off space from the drive and defragmenting it has always been the solution.

You don't happen to be up to date about defrag tools do you? Obviously they still shouldn't be used on SSDs, but I'm not sure if anything is compatible yet with APFS or even Catalina. My long time preferred one, iDefrag, has long since been ceased development and hasn't been supported since High Sierra, possibly Sierra. I do still use it myself strictly on my external media drive, which is not bootable, formatted in HFS+, and only holds media files. I wouldn't advocate using it for anything else but still need to find an alternative. I know TechTool Pro comes with one, but don't know much about its current state.