Second hard drive continually spinning after installing Mavericks

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Second hard drive continually spinning after installing Mavericks

I have installed a second hard drive in place of my optical drive on my MacBook Pro 2010.

Since installing Mavericks, I can hear that it constantly active, performing little bursts of reads or writes every second and never stopping.

This is the case even without any applications running at all. It has only started since installing Mavericks.

If I unmount the drive the problem stops, but no clue is given as to why Mavericks was accessing it (i.e. no errors are thrown).

I am wondering if it is related to the external hard drive issue that people are having:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486167

I don't want the hard drive to be continually reading/writing unnecessarily and it's really annoying to continually mount and unmount the drive. This really needs addressing ASAP.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Nov 6, 2013 8:48 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

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Nov 6, 2013 9:48 PM in response to paulsoulsby

Launch the Activity Monitor application and select the Disk tab. Click the headings of the Bytes Written and Bytes Read columns to sort the process list with the highest value at the top. What are the first few items?

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Answer 2

paulsoulsby Author

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Nov 7, 2013 9:05 AM in response to Linc Davis

mds is the process with most bytes read and written. It also slowly creeping upwards as the second hard drive spins.

lunchd is the next most. It is also creeping up, but at a much slower rate.

Below that are kernel_task and mds_stores, but these and the ones below appear to be pretty much static.

Here's some grabs of the disk activity with the second hard drive mounted and unmounted.

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

Nov 7, 2013 9:26 AM in response to paulsoulsby

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

syslog -k Sender mdworker -o -k Sender mds | grep -v 'boxd\|Norm' | tail | open -ef

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.

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 by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.

The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.

A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

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Answer 4

paulsoulsby Author

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Nov 7, 2013 5:15 PM in response to Linc Davis

OK, just followed you instructions. Here's the output of the text file:

Nov 8 01:12:54 paulsousbysmbp2.config mdworker[3075] <Error>: (Warning) Import: Bad path: