T520 Constant disk activity

T520, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, Win 7 Pro 64 bit,
Do any fellow T520 users see constant, about one flash per second, hard disk activity. I've turned off the usual suspects, including Windows Indexing Service and all the Intel security and management services and uninstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection 12, which has also been mentioned in certain articles about disk thrashing.
The side effects of this constant disk activity is that the computer will not enter sleep or hibernate due to inactivity, although I can force it manually.I'm also worried about premature disk wear.
Any hints would be gretly appreciated.
T520 4239-CTO
T61/p 6459-CTO (Gone but not forgotten)
A31/p XP Pro 1 gig memory
A30/p XP Pro 1 gig memory
TP600 Win 2K 288 mb memory
701C Win 98 Don't ask

HI mixz1,
I can't answer your question directly, but on my T400 running Win7 Pro 64 I also see the HDD LED flash ~ once per second. My guess it's monitoring drive status, not actually doing reads or writes. Even so, the machine sleeps as expected.
Z.
The large print: please read the Community Participation Rules before posting. Include as much information as possible: model, machine type, operating system, and a descriptive subject line. Do not include personal information: serial number, telephone number, email address, etc. The fine print: I do not work for, nor do I speak for Lenovo. Unsolicited private messages will be ignored. ... GeezBlog
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Constant disk activity; who is doing that?

Hello there,
I pimped my G5 with two new internal drives (WD 1TB Caviar Black) and copied onto them clones of other disks and volumes (with SuperDuper), including my old system. Seems to be quite succesful operation; nearly all works as usual again.
Of course I expected mdimport to do some heavy indexing, with constant disk activity as a result.
But, after a couple of days, there is still constant disk activity: every second or so some 5,99MB is being written to disk, according to Activity Monitor.
I do not understand which app is doing this, for no one seems to be very busy at all.
Any ideas out there?
Appreciated,
Marius

I just dealt with this problem effectively on my Mac Pro (Snow Leopard 10.6.4), after considerable mucking around. Hard drive noise, flashing lights, system slow-downs, all driving me nuts (admittedly, a short drive).
Turned out to be Spotlight. As it happens I have a WD Studio 1-terabyte Firewire drive that's always hooked up. I back up to it several times a day when I'm on a project, and it has clones of my application drive and three data drives, all visible on my desktop. I also have a separate Windows drive that's visible. Recently, for reasons known only to Apple, I'm sure, Spotlight began indexing and re-indexing the cloned logical drives on the WD Studio. Never stopped -- as soon as it finished, it would start again. I simply went into the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane from System Preferences, made sure that all my drives appeared in the box, and then removed all four cloned drives and the Windows drive so that Spotlight would no longer index them.
Problem solved. If you have extra physical or logical drives beyond those actually in your system (as opposed to Firewire or USB drives), try removing them and re-adding them in the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane. Then wait for Spotlight to re-index the drives -- could take a bit of time, and the drives will keep accessing until re-indexing is complete. If that works, you're good. If it doesn't and the process just keeps going, you might have to remove permanently the external drives and clones from the list of drives to be indexed. That's what I ended up having to do.
Hope this helps.

Why is there now unusually high, constant disk activity on my Mac?

Firefox 9.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 is churning my HD and then must be force quit. It seems to run but there's definately something new and unusual happening here.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
You are right in that there are a lot of guides around to creating "fake" RAC clusters, however Hunter's guide appears to be one of the best and I found it while browsing around the Oracle website. Of course Oracle stress that it is entirely unsupported and for "education purposes" :)
Well education is what I'm after and I accept that it would perform nowhere near a real cluster. Still the performance issues I'm having appear abnormal.
The background to this is that one the applications I manage at work (Vmware) has a backend DB hosted on RAC. There is an entire database team who look after this area. For my own personal edification I'd like to learn a bit more about RAC (and Oracle in general) and get my hands dirty, though I currently have no long term aspirations to become a full fledged DBA. I'm working through a text on Safari and I thought it would be useful to create a "fake" as you put it cluster at home and play around a bit. Unfortunately the resources to create a "proper" environment are currently not within my means:(
With regards to my problem I was hoping someone here has played around with a similar setup and could advise whether they had similar issues. The 3 days or so I spent labouring through the 60 page guide was far more educational than just reading a text.
I've found that the excessive disk activity appears to be down to my server and Vmware ESXi rather than Oracle. I stopped all instances and CRS and the constant disk activity still continued. I had taken number of snapshots of each linux node during my installation and I'm currently deleting these to see whether this improves things. My hard disk could well be the bottleneck as ESXi is really meant for SCSI controllers and disks if using local datastores.
I'll take your advice and have a trawl through Ebay. I will also install standalone oracle on a seperate box and have a play with that.
Peter

ServiceLayer.exe and constant disk activity

Hi
I wondered what process was causing HD activity every 5 seconds on my system.
File Monitor from Sysinternals reported that the servicelayer.exe performs a series of disk operations every 5 seconds, continuously. It tries to create a directory, fails because directory exists, opens PCCSConfig.dat, does an query on the file, performs three read operations, one query, one read etc ... until after 9 information queries and 32 reads the file is closed - and after 5 seconds the whole process is repeated. A File Monitor log file is attached showing the constant disk access.
Is all that constant disk activity really necessary or is it a bug?
PC Suite: Version 6.83.14.1
Connectivity Cable Drivers: Version 6.83.9.0
PC Connectivity Solution: Version 7.7.10.0
Cheers,
-jh
hemmo
Attachments:
ServiceLayerLog.LOG ‏44 KB

Hi,
I think that it is "functionality", anyway open Nokia Connection Manager and turn off "Serial Port cable"....
(at least that stop my PC with PC Suite 6.84....)
Anyway, you can inform Nokia about this issue if you want

Constant disk activity on 2 node RAC 11g cluster - Can anyone help?

Hi Folks,
My first post on the forum so I hope you go easy with me.
I'm new to Oracle, and thought that the best way to get into it would be to dive in and build an experimental RAC cluster on my home network. To this end I used Jeff Hunter's "Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI" guide.
My only departures from the guide is that I've modelled the architecture entirely within Vmware ESXi on a single quad core Opteron server (HP ML115 G5) with 8Gb RAM and a 1 Tb SATA hard disk. I've also used Openfiler 2.3 for the iSCSI storage rather than the deprecated 2.2. I therefore have 2 Virtual Machines running Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.1, and a 3rd VM running Openfiler 2.3. Each VM has a second virtual NIC connected to an isolated vswitch which functions as the RAC interconnect network.
I've completed the configuration of the cluster and all the checks (as per the article) report that everything is a-OK.
However I've noticed that there is a high rate of disk activity on my server, which continues constantly. I've left the server running overnight and the continuous disk activity is still there! :(
I also noticed yesterday that I could not stop the first instance using either the instance specifc srvctl stop instance -d orcl -i orcl1
or the global srvctl stop database -d orcl. In both cases the command appeared to hang. I had no problems stopping the second instance on the other node though. Not sure whether this is related.
So - does anyone else run a similar "single box" setup, and if you do are you noticing similar constant disk activity? If not could you recommend any troublehooting steps I can take to determine the root cause? While the disk activity is contant, the "bursts" appear random, so it looks like something is going on. Not sure what though! :)
Any replies would be much appreciated.
Peter

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
You are right in that there are a lot of guides around to creating "fake" RAC clusters, however Hunter's guide appears to be one of the best and I found it while browsing around the Oracle website. Of course Oracle stress that it is entirely unsupported and for "education purposes" :)
Well education is what I'm after and I accept that it would perform nowhere near a real cluster. Still the performance issues I'm having appear abnormal.
The background to this is that one the applications I manage at work (Vmware) has a backend DB hosted on RAC. There is an entire database team who look after this area. For my own personal edification I'd like to learn a bit more about RAC (and Oracle in general) and get my hands dirty, though I currently have no long term aspirations to become a full fledged DBA. I'm working through a text on Safari and I thought it would be useful to create a "fake" as you put it cluster at home and play around a bit. Unfortunately the resources to create a "proper" environment are currently not within my means:(
With regards to my problem I was hoping someone here has played around with a similar setup and could advise whether they had similar issues. The 3 days or so I spent labouring through the 60 page guide was far more educational than just reading a text.
I've found that the excessive disk activity appears to be down to my server and Vmware ESXi rather than Oracle. I stopped all instances and CRS and the constant disk activity still continued. I had taken number of snapshots of each linux node during my installation and I'm currently deleting these to see whether this improves things. My hard disk could well be the bottleneck as ESXi is really meant for SCSI controllers and disks if using local datastores.
I'll take your advice and have a trawl through Ebay. I will also install standalone oracle on a seperate box and have a play with that.
Peter

FF 18.0.1 constant disk activity after 1 minute with no tabs open

FF 18.0.1 on Windows XP SP3.
Within 1 minute of starting FF I observe constant and excessive disk activity.
I am unable to use any other applications due to the response time.
I have closed all tabs and disabled all plugins.
I have just started a FF "reset to factory default", but pop-up window for "Please wait while Firefox cleans up your old data" has been running for 15 minutes.
Any ideas?

It sounds like you've got some other problems on your computer as well.
Restart your PC, then try the steps at http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/maintenance/speed.aspx#fbid=6pXkdz7T_94 to try to clean your computer up.
After that, Try to reset Firefox again.

Constant Disk Activity with Mac mini

Hi,
I have a current model mac mini 2.5Ghz (with a few upgrades) that is having a weird issue.
I seem to be getting what appears to be almost constant hard disk activity/noise?
As i'm typing this i can hear a constant thrumming fom what appears to be the hard disk.
The spec is:
2.5Ghz i5
8gb of ram
Apple shipped 750gb 7200rpm HD
Apple shipped 500gb 5400rpm HD
The activity is pretty much constant afer waking from sleep or booting and last for ages.
I have external hard drives connected but as yet have not set up or turned on time machine so i cvan't believe it's that?
Any help please?
Thanks.

Hi, Took some screen graps, all this info means nothing to me though! lol

Constant disk activity

I can constantly hear the HD on my iMac, there is about 1.3 gb Data read and 500mb data written over a period of 30 45 mins?
Im not installing anything, actually just using safari and mail... i've tried repairing permissions but it still continues.

The first step would be to figure out what is causing the drive activity.
Go to Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor, and run it. You will see a list that will guide you to what is going on, specifically what processes are going on in the background.
What you do after you get this information depends on what you find in Activity Monitor. Post back if you need more help.

I can't stop "Reads in/sec" disk activity, remains at constant 20-30

I was hoping this community would be able to help me to solve this problem of constant disk activity I can't figure out. I'm afraid it'll kill my disk eventually.
Problem:
Constant disk access noise, "Reads in/sec" remains at constant 20-30 even when I have next to nothing running. It's clearly attempting to do something. Kernel task is one of the few tasks showing activity, but only a few CPU %.
This occurs only on one user account. If I switch the account to a clean one, disk activity stops.
In Disk Utility I've tried repairing permissions. Also, Verify reveals nothing abnormal.
Setup:
- MacBook Pro 2GHz / 2GB RAM / >50GB Free disk space
- FileVault
- Mac OSX 10.4.9
Advanced
Typing sudo fs_usage in Terminal reveals following constant activity pattern between "pread", "select" and "RdData"
02:22:54 pread 0.000048
02:22:54 pread 0.000046
02:22:54 pread 0.000137 W
02:22:55 select 0.010047 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.015651 W kernel_task
02:22:55 PgOut[async] 0.010949 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.019457 W
02:22:55 pread 0.015706 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000047
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001062 W kernel_task
02:22:55 select 0.010016 W
02:22:55 pread 0.200621 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.023622 W
02:22:55 pread 0.002733 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000045
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001107 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.027815 W
02:22:55 pread 0.002978 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.000150 W kernel_task
02:22:55 pread 0.000049
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001090 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.032117 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000068
02:22:55 pread 0.000043
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001110 W kernel_task
02:22:55 select 0.013820 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.035898 W
I'm running out of things to try. Any ideas on how might I fix this? Should I migrate my (massive FileVaulted) directory to a clean account or what?
MacBook Pro 15" Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2GHz / 2GB / ATI X1600 256MB

Seems you're running some sync program in that user account. Since it doesn't happen in another account, it's not system-wide. If you have one running, quit it and see if that fixes things. If not, then disable FileVault and see that fixes things.

Constant CPU and Disk Activity

I just upgraded my MBP from Tiger to Leopard, and also upgraded from trial to full .Mac account, so I now have an iDisk for the first time.
I have iStat Menus installed and where, before the upgrades, the CPU graph showed a very low level of activity (almost zero) when the computer was idle, it now looks like a picket fence, with spikes reaching almost to the top of the graph. The disk activity graph exactly matches the CPU graph with regular spikes, which occur about very 7-8 seconds.
I opened Activity Monitor, and the highest usage switches between 'Sync Server' (with a value of anything from 2 to 9) and 'kernel-task' (with a value of around 2.5). Something called 'mds' sometimes pops up to the top (with values of 2-3). It appears the culprit is 'Sync Server'. I've tried iDisk sync set to 'Manually', and also with it turned off altogether, but it makes no difference.
Does anyone know what's going on here and, more importantly, how to get my MBP to relax again.
Thanks in advance,
Steve = : ^ )

I'm resurrecting this question because the problem still exists. Restarting the computer always stops the spikes but they always start up again at some point (I'm yet to pinpoint a cause) and, once happening, I can quit all running apps (except Finder) and they persist, and they seem to occur about 10 secs. apart.
The spikes occur in both cores but, if one core has a big spike (close to 100%) the other's is small and vice versa. Or they both have moderate spikes. It seems the total usage is about the same for every spike, though spread differently between the two cores.
And the HD still shows activity at the same rate as the spikes.
Any ideas what I should look for?
Thanks in advance,
Steve = : ^ )
Message was edited by: Steve_Ball

Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Heavy background disk activity but not time machine

Since accepting the Software update that puts my version of ML as 10.8.2 I have began to notice a regular (every hour) constant heavy activity in one of my drives (yet to identify which one).
The said drive(s)?? whirr up and carry out activity that sounds as if it were carrying out a time machine backup BUT there is no indication that time machine is carrying out its job nor are any of the backups date/time stamped for the activity taking place.
Any ideas as to what is happening would be greatly appreciated as it is becoming rather annoying to listen to heavy background activity without being able to identify what is happening.
Thanks in advance
Les

Hi, Was looking through the forum because of a similar issue that occured twice yesterday. I was cleaning up and consolidating my externally connected disks (too many backups) 1 x USB connected, a NAS store and my Airport time capsule. After a long session of deleting files I got the spinning globe on the finder window, I could not access other apps to look at what was going on, but I could here the Time Capsule rattling away. Left it for 20 mins still the same, so had to crash the system to recover (hold power button in). Four hours later and more tidying up, went to shut down and again heard the Time capsule rattling away but this time I got to the white screen and the spinning circle. Twenty minutes later still not shutdown so another crash of the system.
I am not sure whether this problem is the same as you have described but there are similarities hence I thought I would post.
Hope we can find a resolution
Apologies need to update my profile, have iMac 27inch with 10.8.2
Jim

Periodic disk activity when idle

Hi,
I've recently purchased a new Macbook Pro. Whenever my machine is idle, I can hear some disk activity every 30 seconds, even without any applications launched. Activity Monitor confirms this disk activity: every 30 seconds or so, I see red spikes appearing: it's almost like clockwork!
Is anyone else having this issue? I'm worried that this might crash my hard drive :S Thanks in advance!

I recently got a Mac Pro 8-core (Intel Xeon), and have been experiencing constant hard drive activity, but not from the beginning, so it had to come from something I installed.
First off I connected my laptop via firewire and ran Disk Warrior. There were acute problems, as part of the DW conclusion text was in red. After repair, and restart, I found that the the disc activity continued. I saw this thread and the link to another thread prompted me to uninstall Adobe CS3. That did the trick. After a reboot, I ran the CS5 Cleaner program, but that didn't seem to find anything after the uninstall. All that remained was to delete the cache.db in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD/cache/. I rebooted again for good measure. Voila! No more disc activity. I think I'll try re-installing Adobe CS one program at a time, and not do them all in one install. That way, if the disc activity starts up again, I'll know which program did it. Hopefully, that won't happen, and all the demons are exorcised from this machine.

IMac 27" i7 won't turn on. No disk activity.

Ive seen some similar dicussions here but none that are exactly like what happened to me.
The big problem is my iMac is stone cold dead. I push the power button and nothing happens, no disk activity, no fans, no nothing. As if it had been un plugged.
I dont know if it could be related but I was sing Boot Camp. I created the partition, it asked for the windows disk, I put it in. the iMac restarted, I got the chime and the gray screen (no apple logo). I was expecting the windows installer to start up, no luck. The iMac was on the gray screen for several minutes, then the apple logo appeared and then I got the log in window. I thought it was strange so I restarted and held down the "option" key, I got the gray screen for several minutes again. I then got the boot menu where I could see "Macintosh HD", "Bootcamp" and "Windows"(DVD). So I booted with the windows disk thinking it would start up the installer. Several minutes went by and it was still on the same screen. Then it restarted by itself, I heard the chime. Mind you, I had unplugged all the external hard drives I had and what not. So I pressed down on the touch pad to eject the windows disk. The disk ejected and the iMac got stuck on the gray screen for several minutes again. It restarted by itself. I thought I would leave it to boot all the way into Lion again. This time the gray screen didnt go away, I waited for over 20 minutes, got frustrated and pressed down on the power button for a hard reset. I powered on again, got the chime, then I got a black screen with white text saying it could not find a boot device. So I thought I would restart and hold down option key to boot from "Macintosh HD". I powered it down, and it never powered on again. That was it. No Hard drives spinning, no fans runnig, nothing.
I checked the outlet, plugged the iMac to a different outlet, checked the power cable, etc. It all seemed fine.
I reset the SMC, several times in fact, and nothing.
I even opened the Memory Access Door and removed and put back the memory cards. Not sure why, but Im desperate.
So Thats it. Im gonna take it to the apple techs but I thought I would get some comments from the community. Any ideas??? . Any help is appreciated.
iMac specs:
3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB
2TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5

Sounds like a failed power supply. Because the machine is covered by warranty take it into your local Apple Store or AASP for service. Make sure you book an appointment first. You can try doing a SMC reset and Pram reset first but I don't think they'll work.
SMC RESET
Shut down the computer.
Unplug the computer's power cord and all peripherals.
Press and hold the power button for 5 seconds.
Release the power button.
Attach the computers power cable.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.
PRAM RESET
Shut down the computer.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

"Disk Activity" monitor for multiple hard drives?

Is there something like "Disk Activity" in the Activity Monitor utility to show which hard drive is accessed? I put a SSD in my Mac Pro but it occasionally hesitates for a few seconds as if it's accessing a file on one of the other three (slower) hard drives. I want to see a list of files that it needs that aren't on the SSD, so I can move them over and speed up my computer, or remove the extra hard drive eventually.

Yes, it's possible.
However for the maximum length I have not figured out.
I haven't found a reason to go past 16 characters.

JPDA debug slow, CPU low, no disk activity

I tried to debug using JPDA with a Tomcat 4.0.3 target container. If I am very patient it finally connects after some good minutes. After that it debugs, even if rather slow.
However, during those minutes nothing seems to happen. CPU is low (under 5%), and there is no disk activity.
JDK is 1.3.1_02, W95 (yes, still), 256M.
Any ideas?
Thank you,
Florin

I tried to debug using JPDA with a Tomcat 4.0.3 target container. If I am very patient it finally connects after some good minutes. After that it debugs, even if rather slow.
However, during those minutes nothing seems to happen. CPU is low (under 5%), and there is no disk activity.
JDK is 1.3.1_02, W95 (yes, still), 256M.JPDA is really slow in Hotspot/Classic before JDK 1.4 (it's interpreting all the bytecode vs. running it natively). Try using classic if it's available instead of hotspot, it seems to be a bit faster at debugging.
Also, if you can, try JDK 1.4. It's JVM is MUCH faster at debugging than 1.3 is.
Hope this helps,
Rob

T520 Constant disk activity

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