12-10-2011, 05:24 AM

Dear everybody,

I have the following problem:

On my macbook pro (2011) I have the OS and all software on a SSD-drive, and most of my files on the original 5400 rpm-disk.

When I restart my MBP, finder says that I have 40GB of free disk space on my SSD (Total 128GB). After approx 30.60 min of use, all processes start to go very slow, the computer-fan starts, and finder now says that I only have 20GB left, allthough I haven´t copied any files over to the drive. I still have the OS installed on my 5400 rpm-drive, and when I boot from this drive, the same happens, except from the loss of disk-space.

When I repair disk-rights in Disk-Utility (safe mode), a lot of repairs comes up on both disks, allthough last repair was only a few days ago. After the repair, everything is OK for a while, until the same starts happening again…

On activity monitor a whole lot of processes are running. I have no idea what they all do.

In Final Cut Pro X, it says that many events are stored on my SSD-drive, which is not true- they are stored on the 5400rpm-drive and on an external drive.

These strange behaviours started appear approx two months after exchanging my DVD-drive with the SSD-drive. During these two months, everything was just great.

Any idea that could bring my dear mac back to normal behaviour??


Thanka a lot in advance

All the best,

Karl Ivar (Berlin)

12-10-2011, 09:36 AM

Since you have two bootable drives, this is easy -- start from one and repair the hard drive on the other (I'm NOT talking about repair permissions - although you can do that too - just don't worry about the results).

If this doesn't help, you need to use Activity Monitor (utility) to look for high CPU use (don't worry about lots of processes, only worry about high CPU users).

Also, use Console utility to read all the logs, and tell us if any show a repeating entry more than once a minute.

12-10-2011, 12:04 PM

Thanks a lot!!

First a question: -What do you mean by repairing the hard drive when it´s not about the permissions?

In my Activity monitor, these two are at the moment the processes that requires CPU over 5%:
-Adressbook sync- 34%
-Kernel_task: 10%

In the Console, I found many repeating errors… Here are two:

1: This message came a couple of hundred times over a period of ca five minutes, where ca 160-200 of them came during one second… (Different NSProExtendedTimecode each time)
“10 Dez 11 11:27:27 Final Cut Pro[726] ERROR: <NSProExtendedTimecode: 0x12c3c60b0>
time: {INVALID}
timecode mode: ProSMPTETimecodeMode_23976Duration
frame rate: 23.976024 frames per second
audio frame rate: 0 audio frames per second
SMPTE 272M sequence phase frame: 0
film type: ProFilmType_16mm
tempo: 0.000000 beats per minute
0/0 time initialized with non-numeric figTime. Using kFigTimeZero instead.”10 Dez 11


2: This message came ca 1000 times over a period of ca 30 min (The number at the end varies between 3-4 different numbers):
“15:51:30 WDDriveManagerStatusMenu[167] *** attempt to pop an unknown autorelease pool (0x700ca00)”

12-10-2011, 05:03 PM

If you look at the first aid tab, you'll see both repair disk and repair permissions buttons.

I don't use Final CUT so I don't know about those errors - but you were at least using Final Cut Pro at those times, right? I hope someone else has Final Cut Pro and can help.

RE: WDDriveManager:

found on Apple Support:
The response from WD was to update the software or uninstall it. I updated it, but still had the problem (numerous log entries) so I opted to uninstall it - no more log entries. Seems the only time you really need it is to change the RAID configuration.

"Response (John) 11/18/2009 04:56 PM
Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is John.

Try installing the latest version of the WD Drive Manager. Otherwise, you may want to uninstall it as it is not necessary to the operation of the drive.

WD Drive Manager (Mac)
WD Support / Downloads / My Book / My Book Studio Edition II

Sincerely,
John
Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com"

________________

I'd say uninstall WD Drive Manager!

RE: Addressbook sync cpu % - were you in the process of syncing address book with something? iPhone or iCloud (not an expert here, either)

12-10-2011, 05:28 PM

To do as gshali suggested you also need an operating system on the 5400 hard drive to be able to boot from it. Did you clone the SSD or do a clean install on it? Is not WD Drive Manager for external drives only?

12-10-2011, 07:47 PM

Thanks for the contribution, everyone! I´m getting closer.

Im not completely sure how I did the OS-installation on the SSD anymore, but I think I did a completely new installation of the OS on the SSD, and then restored the software from my Time Machine Backup. Then I changed the user directory to point to the other harddrive. I might have done things wrong here.

However, I found the reason for what eats up the space on my SSD. The darn Swap-files! They start nice and small, but after doubled up some times, they end up at 1,07GB of size, and they just keep popping up, while the computer fan is going crazy... This also happens without Final Cut Pro X is running.

After checking in my private/var-folder again now, the swap-file has decreased again, but the temp-files have suddenly increased from under one GB to 7GB... What is happening?? I should have enough Ram (8GB) to handle Omnifocus, Safari and Mail... As I wrote this last four lines, my Mac just gave birth to another 6GBs of swap-files... I guess it´s got the Mac-Cancer...

Help us out here anyone.. Please....

12-10-2011, 08:04 PM

After taking a look at the activity monitor, it seems that the AdressBookSync is taking almost all the virtual memory- at the moment more that 12GB. And I have 12 swap files of each 1GB.* AdressBookSync also takes about 56% of the CPU. This is very wrong, isn´t it?

12-10-2011, 09:58 PM

Yes, that looks wrong. Have you interrupted syncs that were running?

12-11-2011, 10:08 AM

Not that I know. I´ve just been working as always. However, I have to my big frustration noticed how contacts has not been synced through the clouds (through mobile me) as it earlier so smoothly used to do. I´ll check out more what AddressBookSync is/what it does.