OS X disk space fluctuates wildly on my MacBook Pro

[uptownnyc]

I've been dealing with an ongoing problem with my early 2011 MacBook Pro. I have a 250gb SSD as my primary drive, and I swapped out the DVD drive for a 1tb drive. I've moved a bunch of things over to the secondary drive, but still encounter wild swings in the available space on my primary drive.

Yesterday I was receiving warnings that my disk space was critically low, and it was down to less than 1gb of free space. Today it's back up to 20gb of free space.

I've used Grand Perspective to see where the space is going, and I see most of it is being used, but I can't see where the ~20gb or so of free space disappears to so quickly. Since I began typing this message, I've dropped ~2gb of free space.

Any suggestions on how to identify where it's going?

 

[keysofanxiety]

I've been dealing with an ongoing problem with my early 2011 MacBook Pro. I have a 250gb SSD as my primary drive, and I swapped out the DVD drive for a 1tb drive. I've moved a bunch of things over to the secondary drive, but still encounter wild swings in the available space on my primary drive.

Yesterday I was receiving warnings that my disk space was critically low, and it was down to less than 1gb of free space. Today it's back up to 20gb of free space.

I've used Grand Perspective to see where the space is going, and I see most of it is being used, but I can't see where the ~20gb or so of free space disappears to so quickly. Since I began typing this message, I've dropped ~2gb of free space.

Any suggestions on how to identify where it's going?

The issues you're encountering are normally synonymous with a corrupted volume. Have you had an opportunity to verify the volume in Disk Utility?

If this comes out clean, the problem may be related to local Time Machine backups. To disable these, please ensure you have a password set. Open Terminal, type sudo tmutil disablelocal and hit Enter. It will prompt for your password. Please be aware you'll have to type in your password blind as it doesn't show any characters that were typed. Hit Enter once your password's typed in to apply the command. Then restart with 'reopen windows when logging back in' disabled.

 

[uptownnyc]

Disk checks out okay, and I ran the time machine command, rebooting afterwards. I rebooted with ~14gb of free space, and I've since crept back down to ~11gb over the past 10 minutes.

 

[uptownnyc]

And now I'm down to ~2.3gb.

 

[leman]

It is possible that some process on your machine went crazy. There are many ways to track disk I/O in OS X, for starters you can have a look at this article: http://osxdaily.com/2012/01/20/monitor-disk-activity-in-mac-os-x/