G5 Gone Slow - Help!!

Question

Hello world,
I compose music using my G5 and Logic Pro 7.
I recently had to reformat my hard drive due to some odd behaviour (the hard drive icon on the desk top became invisible and I couldn’t access anything in it). Since reformatting the initial problem has been solved but I have been left with a new problem.
I have three drives, a hard drive and an audio drive (both internal), and a Lacie Big Disk (e SATA) for all my sample libraries. Certain functions on my system have now become very slow. I am frequently shown the multicoloured swirling Apple ‘wait’ symbol and the drives can regularly be heard ‘whirring’ and waking up. For example, in Logic Pro 7 trying to open the audio window by double clicking an audio block in the arrange window often shows the multicoloured wait symbol and can take between 10-20 seconds to open the audio window. When trying to use the sustain pedal on a loaded Akoustik Piano preset, it can take about 10-20 seconds till it loads the sustain information, ie, only the first few seconds of the sample is played. Another example is when opening a new window on the desktop to browse the contents on my audio drive, the drive appears empty for about 10 -20 seconds, but then does eventually show the contents.
I have checked my ‘energy saver’ settings in System Preferences and they are set up fine (I tried the ‘never put the drives to sleep’option and this still didn’t solve the problem). I should mention that during the initial reformatting of my hard drive I did not reformat the audio drive or the Lacie Big Disk as I did not want to risk deleting any of my work.
Does this sound like a software or a hardware problem? Should I try reformatting again, and if so, should I reformat all drives?
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Many thanks,
Rob Manning
Dual 2 GHz Power PC G5, 3 GB DDR SDRAM, OSX 10.4.9, Logic Pro 7.2.3   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   Used for Logic Pro 7

Answer 1

Let me offer this idea.
Backup first using SuperDuper to another drive. Boot from that - free to do full copies - and make sure it works.
You always want to have current set of backupS. And you want to run Disk Warrior from hard drive, not from CD.
Often, just the process of cloning a drive is enough.
You don't say how full/empty your drive is, or how old. Disk Warrior is good preventative maintenance and best choice when it gets beyond that to needing to repair a drive. In older systems, it use to be that running Disk Warrior would help performance. It may, just not very noticeable. And not as much compared to a fresh copy will. (SuperDuper defrags files as it copies, and drops from copy temp files that are recreated anyway.)
First - have a couple backups. Second - buy SuperDuper ($29) so you can do faster smart updates regularly (rotate your backup set) - and THEN Disk Warrior. But I've found Disk Warrior finds and fixes things that Disk Utility misses that can help. And SuperDuper is super easy and reliable.
If you boot drive is crowded with files, more than 18 months old, I'd replace it with newer (and larger) drive and use your current boot drive for backups and emergencies.
And just because Disk Warrior (or any disk repair) "fixes" a drive doesn't mean you may not have the contents of files that are corrupt.
You don't use Disk Warrior after reformatting, you use it to rebuild the disk's directory (or catalogue).
DW can also check for drive's status and show how many spare blocks are left, in use, or attempts to reallocate. It does not show read errors or soft errors, but it shows overall SMART status.
Disk Warrior is a "one trick" (rebuilt directory) but it does an excellent job and checks some other area's of the filesystem.