Unwanted Disk Activity

[candycane]

Hi

I have noticed some unnecessary disk activity. Is it normal. I cannot figure out which process is doing this.
Here is a screen shot.


Update: What about the 18.6 GB Data Read vs Data Written

 

[mkrishnan]

Ummm...if you don't know why it's happening, how do you know it's unnecessary? My guess would be that the spikes involve virtual memory maintenance or spotlight indexing....

 

[varmit]

Or the spike could have been your using the Activity monitor, you know, accessing the Activity monitor program. They could be a bunch of stuff, from spotlight indexing, your dashboard monitors updating, even the disks defragging maybe.

 

[superbovine]

There is a lot of complex things that the operating system does to manage applications and hardware that you probably don't understand. I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[jhujhiti]

You're running iTunes. The disk activity is most likely iTunes buffering the next couple seconds of your song. You can change the length of time it buffers in the preferences somewhere, but it's really nothing to worry about.

 

[840quadra]

As others have stated I would suspect the activity to be normal

Spotlight indexes
Virtual memory (pages in, pages out)
iTunes activity
Activity of other programs.

OS X will work to journalize and defrag the system in the background while you do other work, if it sees the need to do so.

How much memory does your computer have?

::EDIT::

How about shutting down some of those Widgets? Perhaps them going out to the internet for updates constantly is causing them to write data into their own separate caches.

 

[jhujhiti]

Spotlight does its work only when changes are made to the filesystem. It doesn't just wake up and decide to go indexing things. Plus, his little spikes are reads, not writes.

 

[840quadra]

Spotlight does its work only when changes are made to the filesystem. It doesn't just wake up and decide to go indexing things. Plus, his little spikes are reads, not writes.

Good point, however I have noted that if other applications are doing changes and using the OS Kernel to update the files, it will index those changes in spotlight as well.

I must also mention that I play on the Terminal quite a bit, and have spotlight index my Network drives as well. Something that is disabled by default.

 

[candycane]

As others have stated I would suspect the activity to be normal

Spotlight indexes
Virtual memory (pages in, pages out)
iTunes activity
Activity of other programs.

OS X will work to journalize and defrag the system in the background while you do other work, if it sees the need to do so.

How much memory does your computer have?

::EDIT::

How about shutting down some of those Widgets? Perhaps them going out to the internet for updates constantly is causing them to write data into their own separate caches.

Hi
Thanks for your help
I still have 40gb free space..I did shut down my machine but still same thing happens with disk activity

 

[JonHurley]

unneccessary disk activity

I have also noticed my mac pro is making small bursts of disk activity noise since connecting to an ipod - is this something to do with it. Also it seems to be worse when mail is running. and in fact whenever it occurs (about every minute or so) some words come up on the activity viewer in mail but so quickly that I cannot read them. Is it anything to worry about? or am I being parnoid?

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Hi

I have noticed some unnecessary disk activity. Is it normal. I cannot figure out which process is doing this.
Here is a screen shot.

Yes. It's normal.
Though you complain about this you don't seem to say if it is detrimental or not. I think you think too much.