IMac acting up in a variety of ways

Question

Hi all,
my iMac (the latest 27inch model) at work (I work in the post production department of a video production company) has started acting up in a variety ways lately for no apparent reason. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do, but here are some of the symptoms the computer is going through:
- Video uploads to Vimeo and YouTube fail on multiple browsers (normally I wouldn't attribute this problem to my iMac, but other computers in our office on the same network don't have this problem, so it's not our network or the video sites' fault)
- When trying to back to an external hard drive, I get this error on random files:
http://www.macyourself.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/010710-findererrorcode36.j pg
- I get a similar error when trying to burn data DVDs where a seemingly random file will cause the burn to fail
- When compressing video files through compressor, random files fail
- Again, random files will fail when transferring to our server
- I moved a video project (source video files, FCP project files, etc) onto my iMac to work on it - Working on the project in FCP was extremely slow with random crashing. Exports failed each time. When I tried working on the project directly from the original hard drive however, everything worked smoothly
- Video encodes from Compressor seem to become randomly corrupt, and result in some of the above behaviour with said files
- The computer is slower in general (Finder, Safari, etc) and tends to hang more
I hooked up my iMac to another Mac in the office and verified (there were a few errors found) and repaired the disk through Disk Utility. After that I verified it again and no errors were found; it said the disk was healthy.
I've been a Mac user for a number of years and have never come across these kinds of problems before. I treat my computers very well and while I run them hard (a lot of video encoding), I keep them healthy and organized.
I realize this is a lot of vague info (please let me know if I can provide any clarification), but I would greatly appreciate any insight anyone would have on this issue.
Thanks!
Jordan

Answer 1

It sounds like a hard drive problem. Modern hard drives aren't like the old hard drives. They shouldn't ever get corrupt. Plus, a modern OS shouldn't allow that corruption to occur either. The fact that you are still getting file system corruption and flaky behavior indicates that you may have a bad hard drive. If Apple will replace it and you want to drag it down there, that would be the best option. A better Disk Repair utility like Disk Warrior might help too. Ordinarily I would just recommend avoiding any chances and swapping out the hard drive. That is good advice for a Macbook but much harder to do on an iMac.