unusual disk activity

Question

i am new in the apple world. I'm coming from pc + ubuntu. I've just bought a Mac Book Pro 13" with 2.5 Ghz Inter Core i5 and ram 4 GB. I am suspicious something is wrong because it i have only skype, chrome, safari, and some other software (a programming light text editor like Sublime text editor) and few other things I listen a continuously little whirr, like when data are read/writte from harddisk. So i opened Activity Monitor and i've seen few peeks in Disk Activity.

I am suspicious that this is smothing wrong with my new mac book. how can i diagnosticate better what is happening? is it normal?

Answer 1

Open a terminal and run this command:

 sudo fs_usage

It will dump the filesystem activity in real time. Once you're ready to stop the trace, close the window or press Control-C. If you're not familiar with sudo or fs_usage, right click on them before you press return and open the manual pages for each command to see what they do.

It's almost certainly fine, but without seeing the scale of the graph, it's hard to know for sure. Your Mac can take several days to optimize the files needed in the fast portion of the drive and finish indexing things (if you dump a lot of data on the drive and spotlight can't index it as it's written).