Disk errors?

[Colinb]

Hi, I'm a newbie and have searched for threads that answer my question but can't see anything specific so I apologise if I'm duplicating anything...
I have an iMac 27" mid 2011 model running El Capitan 10.11.6 and use Parallels to run windows 10 in a VM. the Windows performance has become painful, almost unusable, especially when windows is booting, it takes ages 15-20 minutes and I noticed Task Manager showing 100% disk utilisation for half an hour or so after windows booted and I can hear the disk being hammered. The parallels guys have been looking at it and we did some tests just on the Mac side. While nothing like as bad as the virtual environment, OSx is also slower than it used to be and I can hear the disk being accessed continually... The Parallels engineer thinks it may be the disk that's got some errors and this is causing the problem but I've run Disk Utility and it says it's all OK so:
a) Is there another utility I can use that does a more detailed check of the disk than Disk Utility and,
b) does anyone have any other ideas what the problem could be...
thanks in advance

 

[honestone]

First of all, have you been making backups to an external device? (I am unsure about how such backups would "work" with the "Windows"/Parallels partition)?

Secondly, I suspect you only ran Disk Utility "locally"/directly. A better procedure would be to boot your Mac to the (hidden) Recovery HD partition by pressing the Command and R keys. These links describes that partition:

http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutor...why-its-there-and-how-to-remove-it--mac-31796

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

You would then run Disk Utility from that partition to "look" at your drive.

On the "Mac side", I'm not sure if you are also having a Permissions "issue". El Capitan "supposedly" handles that, but I myself use the excellent (and free!) third party app Onyx to Repair Permissions (plus do some other useful tasks). You can get Onyx from here:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html

Note that Onyx is "OS dependent", so you'll need to get Version 3.1.7.

The unknown aspect of this is the Windows/Parallels partition. I'm afraid I can't help you much with that.

As for more robust disk cleanup/maintenance/repair products, there is TechTool Pro (I use that one, and it is excellent!), and the venerable Disk Warrior.

 

[Colinb]

Thanks Honestone, that's great. Yes, I use Time Machine to back up to an Airport Extreme with a 4TB USB drive attached.
I'm still uploading a large memory dump to Parallels (while they think it's a hardware fault, they're not 100% sure at the moment) so I don't want to do anything until that's finished but will try your recommendations... thanks again

 

[Colinb]

OK, OnyX repaired quite a few permissions errors and cleaned up a lot of temp files etc. I ran Disk Utility from the Recovery partition and it found no errors... when I first ran parallels and booted windows it was really quick... I was excited! But then I restarted everything again and it's reverted to very slow... I'm now sitting in front of the machine, it was rebooted about 20 minutes ago, is only running Safari, Console and Activity Monitor but I can hear the disk being constantly accessed... according to Activity Monitor 'systemstatsd' is the process that's using most disk with 'mds', 'mds_stores' and 'lsd' following closely behind... any thoughts as to what may be causing it to be constantly accessing the disk would be gratefully received.... I haven't yet got TechTool Pro, is it likely to help me on the basis I'm not overly technical? Thanks again....

 

[Colinb]

A quick update... I got a copy of TechTools Pro, thanks honestone, and I think it may have found my problem... the HDD fan failed the test whereas everything else, including the HDD surface scan, passed OK so, I'll get it replaced. Thanks...

 

[honestone]

A quick update... I got a copy of TechTools Pro, thanks honestone, and I think it may have found my problem... the HDD fan failed the test whereas everything else, including the HDD surface scan, passed OK so, I'll get it replaced. Thanks...

Good to hear that TechTool Pro helped you. It would be wise to perform a weekly disk maintenance/cleanup/repair, and backup process. Myself, I do the following 4 tasks on a weekly basis for each of my Macs (of course I already have the previous week's backup to an external device for each of my Macs):

1. Since I use Outlook for my EMail, I run a Microsoft-provided process to permanently delete all deleted EMails.

2. Use Onyx to Repair Permissions, along with performing its other useful disk cleanup tasks.

3. Run TechTool Pro to perform more extensive disk-related tasks. Since you have a "typical" hard disk drive inside your iMac, you can use the Volume and File Optimization features of TechTool Pro, which will help.

4. Run SuperDuper! to make two bootable backups for each of my Macs to two external drives.

Now, regarding ''systemstatsd'', I have no experience with it at all, but via this link, it looks like there could be disk i/o issues with it:

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/systemstatsd-and-disk-io.1841350/

Also, this link was part of a google search I did for 'systemstatsd', and this link contains all those "hits":

https://www.google.com/search?q=sys...rome..69i57.1192j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Maybe someone else has more intimate knowledge about it.