Hi,

I'm trying to identify the source of a problem I'm having lately. The story begins when my daughter comes playing with magnets close to the computer and I arrive a split second too late. I'm talking about Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro Late 2008, with the Hitachi 320gb HDD.

In principle you would think that a $1 fridge magnet cannot make more harm than a magnetized screwdriver, but ever since this happened, my computer started to be unresponsive. All would work well until once in a while it will freeze for about 30 seconds. Sometimes the freezes occur as often as every minute, which renders the computer unusable. The nature of the freezes would require another post (see * below). However, booting from USB everything works wonders, except whenever I try to access the internal drive. Then the freezes come back. Not so often, I suppose because the virtual memory is in the external drive.

So, I figured it would be the damaged harddrive and ran some diagnostic tools. SMART reported no problems, but TechTools Pro found several bad sectors. So I decide to change the drive. I got a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and before installing it try to recover as much as possible from the old drive. In the process, I start getting read/write errors on various files. Notice that before running TechTools Pro I never got read/write errors, only painfully slow behavior.

So, I replace the drive with my new SSD, and already while installing the OS it bugs me that it's not as fast as I expected. Booting for the first time is painfully slow, but the real blow is when I actually start to work again from the internal drive OS, that the freezes come back. SMART stil does not report anything bad. I am afraid of running TechTools Pro on my SSD in case it will start marking bad sectors on it: the drive is brand new!

So it seems that any internal drive causes timeouts/lag/delays/freezes, don't know the exact word.
USB drives work well

So I'm beginning to fear the worst, that the SATA controller is going dead?? How can I tell? Is there some diagnostic that I can run?
and most importantly... HOW CAN A MAGNET MAKE SO MUCH HARM, EVEN TO NON HDD COMPONENTS????

Could I try to connect the SSD in place of the optical drive? I will need an adaptor for it, but they probably use the same controller.

* the kind of unresponsiveness that I encounter is very weird. Some parts of the system will work fine, while others are completely hung. A kind of behavior I have never experienced with OSX. For example, sometimes the web pages will freeze, making it impossible to scroll up and down, or write this text, BUT: the mouse and keyboard buffers are alive because when it recovers it will write all I typed in the meanwhile. Also, during a freeze, I can for example, switch tabs, or applications. The colourful spinning ball may or may not appear. The mouse cursor always remains responsive....

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Thanks in advance for any help,

Alex

Maybe just coincidence, the drive was failing , and the magnet incident .
A less powerful (play )magnet should not be the cause for what you are facing.
And your SATA controller should be ok.

Also the performance benchmarks are not the same for SSD and Non SSD Drives.You will find difference in booting speeds between the two .

Check the power management settings of the machine.Upgrade the Bios if latest is available.Your system seems to be freezing waiting for some response(happens when drives have bad sectors), but it should not carry forward to another drive.

But the system working fine with an external drive (via USB) is confusing .
Proper diagnosis would be required to isolate and solve the problem.