Spinning Ball Want Go Away!

All of a sudden my MacBook has developed an issue where the cursor turns into the spinning ball for about 4 to 5 minutes. Then I am able to return to work briefly before the process starts again. No matter what I have running and no matter what I am doing this happens again and again. I try running disk utility to fix permissions but it gets to less than 2 minutes remaining then the dreaded spinning ball appears but this time it never goes away and I have to restart computer! I fear this is a dying hard drive! Any ideas?

See Here...
The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

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