Identify Process Periodically Writing to Disk on macOS

hard drivesnow leopard

Even when I am not doing anything on my Mac, I see a lot of Disk IO: "Data Written per Sec" in Activity Monitor showns continuous writes:

Disk Activity

Is this normal? Why would some process continuously write? I understand there can be some housekeeping activities going on, the "Sleep image" being updated, but does this happen this frequently? (I have not set up Time Machine)

Edit: I have quite some free memory:

Memory Usage

Best Answer

You can get a better idea what's causing the activity with some of OS X's command-line tools:

sudo iotop -- display of what processes are doing the most I/O, updated every 5 secs.

sudo iosnoop -- shows I/O as it happens, including the process ID and process name doing the I/O, as well as data size, file path, etc

In both cases, you'll need to authenticate as an admin to run them, and use Control-C to exit. They may not tell you precisely why the activity's happening, but they'll at least tell you what processes and files are involved, which usually narrows it down considerably.

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