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I'm having a curious and worrisome problem. For the past few weeks I've been inundated by a problem where after waking from a lengthy sleep, my late 2011 MBP will hang for about 5 minutes with a spinning beachball. I checked the console error log and notice a number of "kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error" lines. Of course, my first thought was that this was a physical hard drive failure. However, I've found that after this initial wait, the computer will run for hours, even perform huge HDD seek and write tasks and produce absolutely no other disk errors, running perfectly smoothly. If this truly was a hard drive failure, wouldn't I be experiencing disk i/o errors fairly consistently?

Another curious thing, before every batch of disk errors, I've noticed that I get a:

"ATSFindFolder timeout. (domain:-32763, dirType:'font', createFolder:false, ATSServer pid:162)"

This may be coincidence and simply the specific task performed during sleep wakeup in line before the operation that causes the disk i/o error. However, it might be related.

System info:

OS 10.9.2, 16GB RAM, early 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1). 1TB 7200rpm HGST HDD.

I recently installed the new 1TB HGST drive, and used a clone program to migrate all my files over from the old drive. But around the same time I upgraded to Mavericks, and installed a host of new software (the reason for the drive upgrade). My disk i/o problems did not coincide directly with any of these updates, though. S.M.A.R.T checks out as drive verified. All disk permissions have been fixed multiple times, PRAM zapped.
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

FWIW, I NEVER sleep any of my Macs. EVER! Too many times they refused to wake up.

It's a laptop, I open and close it a lot, what am I supposed to do?

I'd either leave it open or shut it down when not. You can darken the screen or use a screen saver. My wife's MBP gets shut (closed) and she hasn't complained but she doesn't have DP on there. Not that it's DP, per se, but it hasn't been a problem, especially post ML.

I really don't think that's much of an option in my case, I take it back and forth with me to the office every day. Plus, startup encounters the same 5-minute beachball time as wakeup, so it doesn't really help. I've never had problems with sleep/wakeup before with this machine.

What I'm looking for is a way of getting back to how well it's worked for years. My concern is that the disk i/o may be a symptom of a larger problem and I want to nip it in the bud, not just work around it. thanks though.