Very laggy and insane boot time in snow lopard

[Steven2k7]

When I had leopard installed on my desktop for over a year, it worked perfectly fine with no problems. I decided to install snow leopard on its own hard drive. I got it running, used migration assistant and imported everything from leopard to snow leopard. Everything ran fine for about 2 weeks before I decided to erase the leopard drive and clone leopard to its drive (since it was a faster drive). Everything was fine for about a week or two before I noticed occasional slow downs and lag. Now for about the past month its been nearly unbearable with horrible lag, long boot times and constant pinwheels.

 

After using it for about a day, snow will be using nearly all 6gb of my ram. I've seen it down to just 1mb free once. Even on a fresh boot it will use 1.7gb before I open anything. I just tried opening disk utility and it took 25 seconds to load. Doing something simple like saving a picture in firefox can take 20 seconds before the save menu comes out. Saving a picture in photoshop will take nearly a minute. I cant find anything using an unusual amount of processes (biggest one is firefox with around 450mb used). When I boot up, it takes about a minute just to load to the login screen, THEN about 4 minutes while at the login screen before I can type anything in.

 

I've cleared my caches, ran updates, repaired disk permissions and booted up in 32bit mode and nothing has worked.

 

Specs:

Snow Leopard 10.6.2

Core 2 Quad 2.2ghz

Gigabyte EP35-DS4

6gb DDR2

250gb Seagate 7200.11 OS drive, 500gb 7200.10 main storage drive plus 4 other drives with a total storage of around 3TB.

 

All I can think of is its a hard drive or ram issue. Any ideas on what could be the cause or how I can fix it?