Hard drive fills

[steve217]

Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, my Macbook Pro's hard drive will fill and spit out severe errors relating to a lack of disk space (also the CPU winds up and the fans start spinning).

By occasionally, I mean once in a couple of months, so this isn't a chronic problem but I never know when the machine is going to freak out. A reboot puts everything to rights so I suspect it has something to do with Time Machine backups.

Usage doesn't seem to matter. This problem happened as my daughter was doing some very light homework on the machine.

Any tips on where to look and what may be going on?

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Mountain Lion 10.8.4
8G RAM

Samsung 830 128gb - w/o TrimEnabler and the machine is always left on .

Thanks.

 

[Ledgem]

I don't have a definitive answer for you, but I'd suggest running Disk Utility and using "Verify Disk" to search for problems. Some file system errors can occur if you've ever had to forcefully shut down the computer, and that can cause some issues with things like the system accurately noting file sizes and free space. If there's an issue then you'll need to boot into the recovery partition and "repair disk" using Disk Utility from there.

Hopefully it's as simple a matter as that.

Of course, there's also the obvious question... how much free space do you actually have? The general recommendation for OS X is to leave at least 10% of your hard drive free, and I've read some opinions suggesting that SSDs should have closer to 20% free (for SSD health, not for OS X).

 

[steve217]

I don't have a definitive answer for you, but I'd suggest running Disk Utility and using "Verify Disk" to search for problems. Some file system errors can occur if you've ever had to forcefully shut down the computer, and that can cause some issues with things like the system accurately noting file sizes and free space. If there's an issue then you'll need to boot into the recovery partition and "repair disk" using Disk Utility from there.

Hopefully it's as simple a matter as that.

Of course, there's also the obvious question... how much free space do you actually have? The general recommendation for OS X is to leave at least 10% of your hard drive free, and I've read some opinions suggesting that SSDs should have closer to 20% free (for SSD health, not for OS X).

According to Verify Disk the volume Macintosh HD appears to be ... Ok!

Disk usage is 70gb used, 56gb free.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Ledgem]

Hmm, no TRIM and local Time Machine backups are enabled - that might possibly be it, particularly considering that it happens rarely.

My suggestion would be to download Chameleon SSD Optimizer. Enable TRIM. In the third tab, set "disable local TM" to "ON" in order to turn off local backups, but I would suggest leaving Time Machine enabled ("Disable Time Machine" set to OFF). As another method of saving space (and wear-and-tear on your SSD), set sleep mode to "A" and disable the sleep image.

For what it's worth, I'm using a 500 GB Samsung 840 with those settings and haven't had any issues.

 

[steve217]

Hmm, no TRIM and local Time Machine backups are enabled - that might possibly be it, particularly considering that it happens rarely.

My suggestion would be to download Chameleon SSD Optimizer. Enable TRIM. In the third tab, set "disable local TM" to "ON" in order to turn off local backups, but I would suggest leaving Time Machine enabled ("Disable Time Machine" set to OFF). As another method of saving space (and wear-and-tear on your SSD), set sleep mode to "A" and disable the sleep image.

For what it's worth, I'm using a 500 GB Samsung 840 with those settings and haven't had any issues.

I had TRIM enabled at one point, but I turned it off because, occasionally, the hard drive would fill, the machine would freak out, blah, blah, blah.

Frankly, I don't think the hard drive settings are at issue here. Last night, the machine flipped out on me again after I had gone off to bed. I checked the logs and found dozens of these messages:

Aug 22 21:32:39 winston kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: ps_allocate_cluster - send HI_WAT_ALERT
Aug 22 21:32:39 winston kernel[0]: macx_swapon SUCCESS
Aug 22 21:32:39 winston kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: ps_select_segment - send HI_WAT_ALERT

.. various PIDs began to exit ...

Aug 22 21:32:40 winston com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.coreservices.appleid.authentication[917]): Exited: Killed: 9
Aug 22 21:32:40 winston kernel[0]: memorystatus_thread: idle exiting pid 917 [AppleIDAuthAgent]
Aug 22 21:33:12 winston com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[377] (com.apple.pbs[724]): Exited: Killed: 9
Aug 22 21:33:12 winston kernel[0]: memorystatus_thread: idle exiting pid 724 [pbs]
Aug 22 21:33:13 winston com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[377] (com.apple.gamed[716]): Exited: Killed: 9

... a liberal sprinkling of these messages ...

Aug 22 21:35:48 winston kernel[0]: (default pager): [KERNEL]: ps_select_segment - send HI_WAT_ALERT

... eventually this warning pops up...

Aug 22 21:59:22 winston.local KernelEventAgent[88]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/', from '/dev/disk0s2', low disk

And then the machine cratered with various and sundry messages related to a full hard drive.

This is starting to look like the kind of evil behavior you can only get from a bad memory stick.

 

[twilightrose]

Swap

Next time this happens, open activity monitor and check your current RAM use of page outs, and check how much you have used in SWAP space. I had this issue a long time ago when finder was memory leaking in the background. Slowly and progressively depending on use my system would become unresponsive over a day or a few weeks and when checking activity monitor i would have a ~150GB swap file. Swap is basically your RAM saving to the hard disk when it runs out of usable space, and since your using an SSD you would not notice the excessive slowdown due to its natural speed until the drive is physically out of space, and the fact you mention a reboot fixing this makes it much more likely since a reboot will delete the SWAP file.

 

[cnkdesigns]

Time Machine... on or off?

I keep having the same issue. Today... finally I think I found the answer. Because you are on a laptop (like my MacBook Pro), time machine can be making mobile back ups. Maybe you never used time machine, but if it is ON, you can rest assured it is sucking up space. It is trying to make a temporary back up - until you can get your time machine HD pluggin in.. etc. great for travelers... bad for people like me that use my HD for applications like Photoshop and Video rendering. I was told to go to the FINDER. Click on GO, then go to FInd Folder. type in /volumes if you see one in there called Mobilebackup or something like that... there you go. Go into Time Machine preferences and turn OFF. It will (according to the site) take time to delete everything - even though it will disappear right away.

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html for more info.

This is the only thing that has explained my HD filling up and having nothing to account to it. I have deleted so many things... emptied cache.

Now... one more thing... Again, because you are a laptop, you are also making a Snapshot of your computer as it sits right now. This will help wake everything up when it goes to sleep or you close it up - or run the battery out. One way to remove that is to reboot the computer on occasion. There is also a hybernating setting. It can be several Gigs.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1505922/

Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, my Macbook Pro's hard drive will fill and spit out severe errors relating to a lack of disk space (also the CPU winds up and the fans start spinning).

By occasionally, I mean once in a couple of months, so this isn't a chronic problem but I never know when the machine is going to freak out. A reboot puts everything to rights so I suspect it has something to do with Time Machine backups.

Usage doesn't seem to matter. This problem happened as my daughter was doing some very light homework on the machine.

Any tips on where to look and what may be going on?

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Mountain Lion 10.8.4
8G RAM

Samsung 830 128gb - w/o TrimEnabler and the machine is always left on .

Thanks.