external harddrive eating up memory

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external harddrive eating up memory

I have an external harddrive which stores 1.5 terrabytes of data whereas my MacBookPro has 250 gigs, of which about 50 are not being used. When I connect the external harddrive to my Mac and start to use my external harddrive after about 30 minutes the memory on my MacBookPro will drop to zero. I have a MacOs Sierra and these are the specs on my computer: Now on my external harddrive all it is is the iweb corpus this is just a database of about 22 million words in text files. Till now all I've done is unzipped files, but that unzipping for some reason eats up the memory on my harddrive. I once thought it was just the unzipping but one time I opened a file from the external drive and kept it open. I didn't do anything with it but 30 minutes later my computer's memory went to 0. I think this happens quite fast because i'll keep an eye on it and it will hover around 50 gigs, then wham! all of a sudden the memory is gone. When I leave the harddrive connected and do nothing to it and not open any files it seems to have no effect but admittedly i haven't done this that often.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.5)

Posted on Sep 13, 2018 11:14 PM

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kyle76 Author

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Sep 14, 2018 2:11 PM in response to kyle76

I think I solved the problem. I went out for about an hour and when I came back the disk space decreased from 100 gigs to 30 gigs on my internal drive and all that I was doing with the external drive was keeping a file open. I looked at the activity monitor and found that mds_store was taking up 134 gigs of bytes written in the disk storage, not that I understand what that means. I looked up mds_storage and found this article: https://macmetric.com/fix-mds_stores-consuming-high-cpu-usage/ What was probably happening is that the mds_storage was indexing the files of the entire computer both internal and external drive and that was what taking up the disk space. I followed the recommendations in the article and for the past hour my disk space size has not changed in spite of the fact that I'm using the external drive.

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external harddrive eating up memory

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