It is the smallest things

Thought my 5 year old iMac lost it's mind. I tried everything. Getting rid of unimportant APPs like time machine scheduler, unplugging stuff. I finally started to suspect one of my external LaCie drives I use for storage. That one was backed up by a second one. After about 3 weeks o this I took my Mac and that drive in. Mac is fine. The enclosure was failing which was causing intermittent issues. Hard drive still OK. Hard to believe how much that would lock up not only programs but the OS and cause poor shutdowns and startups.

I believe it.

It's all attached to the same bus of traffic and when it's having a hard time mounting and going in and out due to intermittent disconnect, it will interrupt everything basically during that moment as these machines are still not perfectly multi-task capable in this regard.

Heck, I lose my marbles just waiting for a HDD to wake up when I access something and the whole systems hangs while the OS waits for the wake up sequence, checks that its mounted, and then gains index access. I almost set everything to never spin down or sleep due to this. Same idea, when your drive intermittently falls off the bus.

Very best,

Thanks. It was frustrating but a good learning experience.