Okay, I leave this one to the geniuses here to try to help figure out.
When I'm sitting and working on my PowerBook, it should be relatively quiet except for the fan occasionally popping on during heavy usage or the hard drive clicking when it is accessing files. Right? Well, even when the computer is sitting
idle and should be doing absolutely nothing, the hard drive spins up, ticks once, and spins back down regularly every 30 seconds.
Aside from really annoying me with the ticking sound, this also must be decreasing my battery life as well as shortening the life span on my hard drive since it shouldn't have to do that so frequently. Am I right?
I quit every single user process that I could, even the Finder. There were no extra processes running in the background that would have begun from startup. All of the servers for filesharing, Apache, etc. have been turned off. Yet, SOMETHING kept accessing my hard drive.
So, I opened up the terminal and piped fs_usage out to a file. I grepped out the lines containing WindowServer, CACHE_HIT, and cupsd and was left with this curious "update" process writing something exactly every 30 seconds
Quote:
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14:11:35 WrData[async] 0.004469 W update
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I did a little research and I found that this "update" executable is located at /usr/sbin/update. It even has a man page entry! So, I fired up "man update" to find:
Quote:
NAME
update - flush internal filesystem caches to disk frequently
SYNOPSIS
update
DESCRIPTION
The update command helps protect the integrity of disk volumes by flush-
ing volatile cached filesystem data to disk at thirty second intervals.
Update uses the sync(2) function call to do the task.
Update is commonly invoked at startup time by rc(8) when the system goes
multi-user.
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Yeah, that sure helps a lot.
At least it confirms that it is writing to the drive every 30 seconds, but WHY? Call me crazy, but doesn't this seem a little overzealous for the system to think it needs to write to the drive that often?
I just checked my girlfriend's iBook and it does exactly the same thing. Every 30 seconds, the hard drives gives this annoying grind-tick as the update process comes to life.
I'm tempted to just sudo killall update.
My questions for the experts here are as follows. Is it really normal to have the update process constantly writing to the drive every 30 seconds? I've rebooted and I have lots of RAM (1.25 GB). What is the point of Apple's "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option when they will NEVER go idle because of this process? What are the consequences of killing it?
Many thanks to any who can extend some advice. I've been wracking my brain over this one.
