Hard disc constantly writing

Mail is killing me...any thoughts? This is a small sample of a very long string (click on image to see it better). Thanks.

My IMac is constantly writing. Same popcorn noise. Driving me batty.

It started a few days ago when we started syncing all our computers and iphones on icloud and on the ical apps. Makes me think that some monitor software is being run. I also think worse case, that I'm being hacked.

Any help? Thanks

how do you obtain the graph

I had a lot of problem with my MBP and external discks

I'm looking for an utility also to check what process is writing or reading or DELETING something on my disks.
Due to a not know event time ago I lose all data on my external HDD (hfs).

I and an external recovery lab was able to recover data losed by LOGIC damge !!
Now on ntfs disk I had lose a direcotry, resored form I backup and losed again.
Different disck, different file system.
I can hear my disk working but I could not found nothing on the web tha can tell me under osx (a be able to know by defoult activity monitor in linux or ms windows) what process is doing it !!
Unbeleveable...
I can see the graph of disk activity by read-write/time

I can sort applicacion by sended\received messages

BUT I CANT SORT THEM BY WRITE\SEC READ\SEC.

Your application is not a solution for my problem but maybe it can help me.

Can someone help me ?

I have just done a complete re-install from a USB stick with the Lion installer on it (per www.tuaw.com's recipe) after nearly been driven around the bend by the rattling HDD on my iMac i7 with Lion installed. Things were quire until I added my Mailsmith setup from Time capsule backup - and then it all sorts of bedlam broke loose almost immediately afterwards.

Having read TZW's commnet ablut adding the HDD to Spotlight's exclusions, I did the same to mine - and now blessed peace and quite! Fantastic! Thanks TZW 🙂. At the peak of the racket Activity Monitor was showing a sustained 200+ disc-writes per second. With the HDD struck off the Spolight snoop list it's zero until I do something like open a window, etc. Now I don't have to worry so much that the HDD will fail early with torn-off heads, although its life may have been shortened a bit (this had been going on for several months).

Fingers crossed that it stays that way!

Many thanks, once again.

Cheers,

Alex.

One other comment: at no time did the indexing dot appear in the top RH Finder menu-bar Spotlight icon during the disk-thrashing episode(s).

SImilar problem. iMac, i7, Lion, stacks of free memory and HD space. Finally stopped the constant hard disk churning (that slowed and at times even stalled things completely) by logging out of iCloud! Logged back in and problem returned, fixed again by logging out. No loss to me as I have never used the service to its suggested "full advantage."

No idea why this fixed the problem, and will need to leave that to clever people to test further/investigate and report back. But would be interested if this also fixes it for anybody else.

Did EVERY SINGLE small thing to tweak system to stop i/o noise.

- Cleaned all apps having large databases

- .plist files

- start up daemons/procs

And just doing a "select-all" in Activity Monitor stops drive churn, am just astounded!!! Hope it does not happen again and that AAPL engineers are reading.

Hey there,

I've had this same problem on my 27" iMac, (late 2009). It looks like different apps causing the problem, but I think the hard drive itself was the problem.

Apple has issued a recall on the Seagate hard drives for iMacs between 2009 and 2011. I replaced mine, restored a backup, and the problem is gone.

Details here - enter your iMac's serial number to see if it's a part of the recall:

http://www.apple.com/support/imac-harddrive/

I hope that helps!

Hey guys, after months i fixed my problem and im no guru so hopefully this should help.

Someone previously mentioned icloud was their issue, got me thinking, only reasons a HD would be writing/reading:
1.indexing
2.uploading/downloading
3.editing files on the computer (using an app etc.)

as i wasn't doing anything, and indexing was off it must be uploading/downloading.

In activity monitor i looked at every process that related to the network/internet and clicked quit process (didn't touch ones that under 'user' say 'root' as i heard thats a bad idea)

in the end one related to a file sharing program - which i never opened called tvmobi or something, kept coming back into the activity monitor after i quit it. I then deleted the program and no issues 😀

summary: if it keeps popping back in activity monitor, i assume that means its open doing somehting - delete it.

can anyone comfirm this or add?