Chosen Solution
Hey everyone, having a strange problem. I recently upgraded to 16 GB of RAM, and I’m not sure if this problem is directly correlated to that. My HDD has been writing/reading data like crazy since I upgraded, specifically spotlight, racking up GB’s of data written in less than half an hour, mdworker processes and mds_stores were using a crazy amount of CPU but then it would settle down after a while. So, I disabled spotlight through the terminal since I don’t really use it anyways and most of the huge reading/writing stopped, but I still feel the HDD starting and stopping at a pretty steady rate, and in activity monitor I see the process “launchd” slowly writing data usually at a rate of up to 500 KB, and my storage space slowly dwindles. So is this because I upgraded the RAM so there are larger cache’s and such? I have no idea what I’m talking about really, I have used a bunch of different terminal actions to spit out a bunch of code trying to isolate what is in launchd, the sloth program to try and identify which part of launchd is writing bytes, cocktail program to try and fix any indexing issues. Or is the process “launchd” constantly writing data a normal thing? I should mention the computer isn’t slow, its as fast as it was before I switched the RAM. DriveDX tells me the drive is alright, it gives me three warnings (Start/Stop count, G-Sense Error Rate, Load Cycle count), so I am not convinced this is my drive going bad. I also notice my sleepimage file is pretty big, almost 10 GB’s, and the process “coresymbolicationd” is bigger than I ever remember. Last bit of info is I removed my broken optical drive recently and left it empty, it may just be coincidence but it seems to coincide with this event, though I can’t imagine removing a broken optical drive affects the HDD writing data. Am I looking at doing a clean OS reinstall? Thanks for any answers/advice, let me know if I should provide any logs and instructions on how to get said logs, or any other information to get a better solution!
Sounds like the encrypt may have gotten turned on. Look in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault and see if it is turned on.
This series tends to have HD SATA cable breakdown. I would recommend replacing it with the better MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable. Even still I would place a strip of electricians tape on the uppercase to help to protect it from the rough aluminum case. The last issue is the folding of the cable you want rounded bends not sharp bends.
