Disk accesses every 30 seconds or so?

[pubwvj]

My computer is doing a disk access about every 30 seconds or so. This prevents it from putting the hard drives to spin down and prevents the Mac from going to sleep. A bit of a problem when running on battery unplugged from the AC power.

PowerBook G4 15" AL 1.67GHz 2GBRAM
(PowerBook5,8 = PowerPC G4 (1.5))
MacOSX10.4.11 all up to date

I have stripped down all extras such as MenuMeters, Tablet, DejaVu, etc.
I have quite out of all applications so that just the Finder is running.
I have sharing turned off (personal file, printer, fax, etc).

Listening I hear the hard drive click approximately every 30 seconds.

Opening and watching Activity Monitor I can't spot the culprit.
I don't see anything to alert me in Console.

Any suggestions on pinpointing what task is doing the disk activity that is blocking hard drive spin down and sleep?

Many thanks,

-Walter

 

[larkost]

If you have XCode 3 or 4 installed, then you can use Instruments to look at disk access.