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.
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.
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