Constant Delays / spiny ball every 2 minutes

Question

On my mack book pro (intel duo core, 2.0ghz w/ 1.5gb of ram).
Every 1.5 to 2 minutes, I get a 15 second delay, when doing anything. Typing, surfing the web, watching a movie, or even just sitting there. It happens with no apps open, or tons of apps open, and on 2 users.
It is the most frustrating thing to wait for 15 seconds and watch a spinning beach ball every 2 minutes.
I have the most recent software & firmware updates.
Any one have any idea what is going on? what can I do to get it to stop.

Answer 1

I'd suspect that your hard drive may be dying. Modern hard drives have error detection and correction built in, and if the drive encounters a firm error, one where it knows it didn't get a read of the sector it was told to read, it continues to re-read the sector until it gets a good read.
You could always identify this problem under windows 9X, because the OS had to kick back into the non-multitasking DOS environment to read the disk, and wait for DOS to pass the data back to the OS, therefore when this problem occurred, everything on the machine stopped until the sector had ben read and control was passed back to the 9X kernel, even the mouse pointer would stop moving.