Disk activity in new Mac Pro

[Roller]

The past week, I've been noticing frequent, repeated disk access in my 2010 Mac Pro, even when it's otherwise idle. Activity Monitor shows no unusual processes, and I've disabled Spotlight indexing. Any thoughts?

 

[spinnerlys]

Have you taken a look at Activity Monitor > Disk Activity and seen how much data was written or read?

 

[davelanger]

The past week, I've been noticing frequent, repeated disk access in my 2010 Mac Pro, even when it's otherwise idle. Activity Monitor shows no unusual processes, and I've disabled Spotlight indexing. Any thoughts?

Mine does this as well.

 

[SpookyLars]

The past week, I've been noticing frequent, repeated disk access in my 2010 Mac Pro, even when it's otherwise idle. Activity Monitor shows no unusual processes, and I've disabled Spotlight indexing. Any thoughts?

Same here. I have no idea what's going on...

 

[Roller]

Have you taken a look at Activity Monitor > Disk Activity and seen how much data was written or read?

Not a lot of data. The accesses last a second at most and always have the same pattern. That is, the sound that the disk makes is almost identical every time.

 

[DualShock]

Take a look at system.log in Console (/Applications/Utilities). By default Console auto-refreshes the currently open file when it is written to, so you can see what is going on in real-time.

Maybe something is writing to the system log, possibly due to a misbehaving process or something similar.

 

[Roller]

Old thread, I know, but I'm posting in case this might help someone with a similar problem:

The problem got worse over time, and I never could identify a software problem. So I eventually replaced the drive and the computer's fine now.

 

[JavaTheHut]

...and the drive was a __________?
thx

 

[Roller]

...and the drive was a __________?
thx

Good question - I should have included that.

It was a Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM 2TB drive that came with the Mac. But I haven't heard of any widespread problems with this drive, so maybe it was just something flaky with mine. I posted because it hadn't really occurred to me until recently that the drive was at fault - I thought it was a rogue background process or something similar.