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Constant disk activity with 2.3Ghz i7 late 2012 Mac mini

zen

zen

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 26, 2003
1,713
472
I've only had my new Mac mini a few days, but I've noticed nearly constant hard disk activity, even when the machine is doing nothing.

My office is nearly silent when I start work in the morning, and I was puzzled by the slight ticking from my computer. I opened Activity Monitor, and under Disk Activity it shows nearly constant activity under writes out/sec, data read/sec, and data written/sec. The amount of data is only about 4k to 500k, but it is constant, and I can hear the hard drive working when the computer is doing absolutely nothing.

I have 16GB of RAM and a regular factory hard drive.

It's not a problem and there are no performance issues, but I'm curious. Is this normal computer behaviour?
 
justperry

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,557
9,750
I'm a rolling stone.
zen said:
I've only had my new Mac mini a few days, but I've noticed nearly constant hard disk activity, even when the machine is doing nothing.

My office is nearly silent when I start work in the morning, and I was puzzled by the slight ticking from my computer. I opened Activity Monitor, and under Disk Activity it shows nearly constant activity under writes out/sec, data read/sec, and data written/sec. The amount of data is only about 4k to 500k, but it is constant, and I can hear the hard drive working when the computer is doing absolutely nothing.

I have 16GB of RAM and a regular factory hard drive.

It's not a problem and there are no performance issues, but I'm curious. Is this normal computer behaviour?
Click to expand...

Do you have TimeMachine running on the Mini?

Open Activity Monitor, select processes for all user in the drop down menu on top and make a screenshot (Command-Shift-4 then hit spacebar and click AM window) post screenshot here.
 
zen

zen

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 26, 2003
1,713
472
justperry said:
Do you have TimeMachine running on the Mini?

Open Activity Monitor, select processes for all user in the drop down menu on top and make a screenshot (Command-Shift-4 then hit spacebar and click AM window) post screenshot here.
Click to expand...

I have Time Machine, yes, but a backup isn't running when I get the disk activity.

Screenshot posted:
 

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benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,382
201
Log messages in Console utility may be of some help. Of course, logging messages is itself a task that writes to disk.
It could be Spotlight indexing (though that doesn't seem to be evident from your photo), or various other tasks.
If you had a Fusion drive, then it might even be the OS moving files around.

I would be worried if there was a constant and continual significant amount of data being written, all the time forever. Otherwise, if performance isn't affected, then you have nothing to worry about.
 
justperry

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,557
9,750
I'm a rolling stone.
zen said:
I have Time Machine, yes, but a backup isn't running when I get the disk activity.

Screenshot posted:
Click to expand...

Not much to see, although I see 2 instances of MDworker which is part of Spotlight indexing AFAIK but no processor activity there.
Are there two active users(2 X MDworker)

You should also look at how many pageouts there are in Activity Monitor's System Memory.
 
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