Starting a week ago, my hard disk keeps filling up over a 15 minute period

http://www.filldisk.com/

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/1/4042728/html5-browser-exploit-could-let-prankst ers-fill-up-your-hard-drive

Use Firefox instead

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/

Do you use dropbox?

I suggest one of two options:

Off load 100 - 200 GB data (or even more) and see what affect that has.

Install a larger HDD, 750 GB or 1 TB for the current one.

Ciao.

I think your HDD is too full and with more space it will not crash.

Ciao.

Great program:

http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

You can also use terminal commands such as "top" and "iostat" to dtrace the process writing to your drive. Read the man pages.

...and remember, SSD is not a disk like a HDD...if it were it wouldn't be awesome 😎

Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:

iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash

If you're using Time Machine to back up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of files you've recently deleted. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as "Backups." The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself.

To locate large files, you can use Spotlight. That method may not find large folders that contain a lot of small files.

You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.

Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.

Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.

ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.

Back up all data now.

Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.

Triple-click the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.

The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders. It may take some minutes for ODS to list all the files.

I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.

When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

What I would suggest is that you run ODS immediately after rebooting, then again when you notice the change in available space. Compare.

From the terminal:

sudo iotop -t 5 900 1 > ~/desktop/tracerun.txt

This would trace the top 5 I/O processes for 15 (900 seconds) minutes and save the log "tracerun.txt" to your desktop. You will see which process is writing like crazy....

sudo iotop -t 5 3600 1 > ~/desktop/tracerun.txt

Same thing, for one hour. You get the point. Just leave the terminal open when doing so.

5506257(0) pageouts

How much RAM do you have installed? 8 GB? The pageouts are huge (which would account for the accumulating disk usage > the swap space) , and I don't think it is due to insufficient RAM. This appears to me as just a huge memory leak. The machine isn't freeing up inactive RAM for reuse. Try reinstalling ML from the recovery partition.