The [Disk IO] Pig that is macOS

[RangerOne]

Apologies in advance for my exasperation. I have clearly lost my cool. In fact, I've chased it through the park with a paintball gun screaming "Give me quiet or give me death!"

For years, I have been aware of people complaining about photolibraryd and spotlightd and other macOS system daemons that both READ and WRITE a stupendous amount of data for no apparent reason. I never really noticed this myself because I had most of my content on my internal iMac SSD -- which is silent.

For Christmas I upgraded to a pair of 8TB USB 3 hard drives in a RAID 1 set for media content and other large file storage, sitting below my iMac's monitor shelf.

Ever since then I have been plagued with an unbelievably-irritating, incessant sound of twin coffee grinders chopping away on my desk. It's loud enough to irritate the living heck out of me even while I'm listening to music. My entire desk vibrates. I have tried adding rubber pads under the drives and even 3D-printed a large enclosure with vents at the back, but nothing has helped. The grinding rages on unabated at least 95% of the time I am on my machine -- even though I use NOTHING on those drives during the typical day.

Every time I run an inspection, it's always Photos or Spotlight or some other process that has no reason whatsoever to be indexing a drive with mostly static content with days or weeks between updates. This is a pretty clean machine (rebuilt yearly with just Apple's typical OS apps, MS Office, Zoom and some Remote Desktop tools). I have not added photos to my iPhoto library in 5 months, and honestly haven't taken a photo in weeks. Why has it written out 230gb of data and read nearly 400GB? It's not rebuilding the library, it's not rebuilding the thumbnail cache... what is going on?

I force-quit photolibraryd but within a minute, it comes back. It's like an insidious virus, or those in-laws that just will not go away.

I tell Spotlight not to index anything... and still, it grinds away.

I don't use the News app on the Mac (love it on iPad and iPhone), yet it's written more than 5GB since I rebooted this morning.

launchd is for managing services. Why has it written 43GB to my disk today?

How on Earth could the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent write 32GB to my disk? Today? My bookmarks haven't changed in weeks, and I don't have many of them.

Some of these aren't even using (I think?) the external HDDs, so I don't know that they're really contributing to my drive-grinding problem. It's the lack of control and insight into the root cause that is frustrating.

I held off on buying a $6199 Mac Studio because I was honestly afraid of the SSD write lifecycle being exhausted by all this Apple noise. Since Apple so brilliantly makes those SSDs non-replaceable, that's one helluva risk with such a ridiculous IO duty cycle.

Yes, I know I can unmount the drives... but I can't do this when the demon of disk IO is grinding away at them. I know I can reboot and then unmount the drives, rebooting is a pain with many dozens of apps and dozens and dozens of windows open, plus then it's annoying to need to mount them again (they're also used by the Apple TV app's media library, which isn't used during the day).

I am not optimistic for a software solution because this is a 2014 iMac 27 "Retina" and it can't run the latest OS. Plus many others in these forums have complained about similar disk IO issues in macOS for years.

I really hope Apple finds ways to maintain functionality without being so disk-abusive. I understand the need to index things, but not if they haven't changed... and if I kill something, I expect it to stay dead.

If anyone has any silver bullets I may have missed in the dozens of threads I scanned, please let me know. Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

The external storage... is it comprised of platter-based hard drives?

If so, did you reformat them to APFS?

If so, that's a mistake. APFS will fragment HDDs -and- tends to make them "thrash" with too much disk activity.

For platter-based drives with m-series Mac, you want to keep them at HFS+ as long as you can.

Another thing, and this is a "Fishrrman/troglodyte" recommendation:
TURN OFF Spotlight indexing.
Just turn it off. (using terminal)

I've done this with every Mac and every version of the OS since Spotlight came out.
I DON'T WANT it "mucking with" my drives.

And one other thing I ALWAYS do to prevent over-working my boot drives:
I TURN OFF virtual memory disk swapping so that the OS CANNOT be continually writing/reading VM files to/from the disk.

Of course, if one does this, one must keep an eye on "open apps" so as not to overload the physical (ONLY) RAM available.
I do this and I have NEVER had a "memory-related" crash while working.

 

[kennybroh]

I force-quit photolibraryd but within a minute, it comes back. It's like an insidious virus, or those in-laws that just will not go away.

I have the same problem. Driving me crazy... Anyone have a solution?

 

[yangm]

APFS will fragment HDDs -and- tends to make them "thrash" with too much disk activity.

For platter-based drives with m-series Mac, you want to keep them at HFS+ as long as you can.

HFS+ being a sorry mess which craps itself not long after a year or so of use, you can't use that for Time Machine backups anymore.

To add insult to injury, APFS formatted disks never spin down, even after ejecting (they also don't go away from Disk Utility as if they were internal or something), so I always give a few seconds to my external HD flush its caches before painfully pulling the cable from the still spinning thing.

Using macOS Sonoma (14.5) there are so many issues which only accumulate over each macOS release but on the io subject there's a particularly annoying one: wakeup from sleep sometimes results in a soft frozen login window with a frozen clock, probably stuck at time of death, a spinning beach ball which doesn't follow mouse movements, the stupid animated background playing as if nothing was hang up and the password cursor also blinking but not accepting inputs.
So how do I know this is IO related? Because sometimes this happens when an external drive is connected, and yanking it from the system immediately un****s things up.

No amount of fresh installing, resetting PRAM and SMC or some other panacea samba fixes these or other core issues because they just haven't been addressed by Apple. And worry not, they're not hardware issues from aging macs, they are software issues seen even by the apple silicon users.