Chosen Solution

Macbook Pro 13" mid 2012 (MD101 with i5/2.5/500) came in with busted HDD (was not possible to recover data). Replaced the HDD with a Toshiba 500GB drive 2.5", installed a new system 10.8. Couple of months later, laptop came back, working very very slow, taking lots of time to react to right-mouse click, double click on video and it hardly plays. Last time I turned it on, the wallpaper was blank and would only “reveal” the wallpaper image where the mouse pointer hovers. Disk utility did not detect any problem with the HDD. Tried replacing the HDD cable, and tested the laptop, it started working perfectly well. Few days later (today), owner called and said laptop was very slow and unresponsive. What should I explore next?

  • Boot from external HDD?
  • What else can I try? I will have limited time to work on this one since owner will travel tomorrow and I would like to have all options on the table to try them one by one. Thanks for any help provided!

Toshiba drives are slow. Hard drives in general are slow as !&&*, but Toshiba takes the cake with laptop drives. When the drive cable goes bad the drive goes bad soon after usually. Slow is really subjective though. I find any machine with a mechanical hard drive feels “broken” after using an SSD for three years. Get them a 500 GB SSHD from seagate, the 8 GB cache of SSD storage for apps/OS and whatnot makes it feel fast to them so they won’t call back and ##&&% that it is slow.

How much RAM does the system have? This same model has been around for 2.5 years; the stock build has only 4GB RAM, which is wildly insufficient to do anything more than start the OS. It will take 16GB, which will make the system much faster.

You may want to investigate what the user is doing with his system. It’s starting to sound like the HD is very full and/or highly fragmented. I would try running Disk Utility first booting up from an external drive to see if just doing that alters things (without touching the hardware). If it did that likely points to the full/frag’ed drive issue (your drives btree was fragmented). I would give Drive Genius or some other good defrag app a try next so all of the files got cleaned up. The other point here is the drive maybe on the small size for what this person is doing. Maybe a bigger drive is needed. I would go with a SSHD (hybrid drive). While I love SSD’s, there lack of space given the cost factor and using them in a dual drive setup as not being stable in this series limits there usefulness. We gave up doing the dual drive after having so many problems. Which is why we stick with the Seagate SSHD as our solution. Here you get the speed of the SSD and the deep storage of a traditional HD in one device replacing the HD with it.