Annoying Continuous Disk Usage... corservicesd Culprit?

[Hemingray]

Okay, this has really started to get on my nerves. Once in awhile, every 3 seconds or so my hard drive will have read/write activity when it's idle (with no programs running). I've been able to pinpoint it to the "coreservicesd" process. If I force quit this process, the disk activity stops.

See the screenshot below to see the spikes in disk activity from within Activity Viewer, and notice coreservicesd in the active processes.

Does anyone know what the heck this process is doing? It gets really annoying when you start noticing it.

 

[OutThere]

Coreservicesd (Coreservices Daemon), controls some icon management and drag and drop functions.

It seems to have been a problem in Jaguar, with hanging and other problems.

All I can think of is the possibility that its permissions got messed up and it can't do its job. Have you tried repairing permissions?

I can't stand when my computer starts churning my hard drive without telling me what it's doing.

If checking permissions doesn't help, a reinstall might be in order, unless someone else has a better idea.

 

[Hemingray]

Update

Bingo! Apple Discussion Forums to the rescue. Glad to hear it's not just me...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=743633

Edit: Thanks for the help OutThere. I have repaired permissions and cleared caches, all that good stuff, but it's still cropping up. I'll keep y'all posted.

 

[OutThere]

Interesting. Spotlight has always been sketchy about what and when it is doing. Look at your system.log in the console for more info, maybe.

 

[Hemingray]

I don't know if it's related to Spotlight... it appears to be somehow tied to the LaunchServices database.

I tried running Onyx to reset the LaunchServices database and run the daily/weekly/monthly scripts, but the problem persisted after rebooting.

So then I went into Activity Monitor and force quit coreservicesd. Then I went into the /Library/Caches directory, deleted both LaunchServices cache files, and rebooted. The problem appears to be gone now (at least for now).

I can still hear periodic disk activity when it's idle, but it's probably normal operation, and nothing like the every few seconds I was getting before...