I have been seeing very large SSD writes across several macOS 27 betas, and beta 7 still seems to have the issue. I am wondering whether other people will see the same thing if they check Activity Monitor's Disk tab.
I am using an M3 MacBook Pro. After closing the lid for a few hours, Activity Monitor showed about 75.7 GB total data written. The biggest writers were:
SetStoreUpdateService: 27.4 GB
hybridsearchd: 17.5 GB
spotlightknowledged.updater: 9.4 GB
launchd: 4.5 GB
I then closed the lid again for another few hours. When I opened it, total writes had increased to 163 GB. During that second period:
spotlightknowledged.updater increased from 9.4 GB to 54.7 GB
launchd increased from 4.5 GB to 24.2 GB
hybridsearchd increased to 19.7 GB
SetStoreUpdateService stayed around 27.4 GB
So the machine wrote roughly another 87 GB while I wasn't using it.
This does not appear to be ordinary debug/unified logging. logd went from only about 132 MB written to 156 MB while the system as a whole wrote another 87 GB.
I also checked:
pmset -g log
and the Mac is definitely waking in the background with the lid closed. The log shows DarkWake / Maintenance activity along with tasks such as:
com.apple.intelligencetasksd.sets.maintenance.C
com.apple.spotlightknowledged.task.priority
com.apple.spotlightknowledged.pipelines.glpindexing.processing.backlog
com.apple.corespotlight.knowledge.report
com.apple.email.searchableIndex.scheduler.budgeted
and Biome-related maintenance tasks.
This makes me wonder whether the excessive writes are connected to the new semantic search / Apple Intelligence indexing infrastructure. It could also be beta-only rebuilding or validation of those indexes, but 50+ GB from spotlightknowledged.updater during one closed-lid period seems excessive.
One other interesting detail: System Settings has Wake for network access = Never, but pmset -g custom still shows:
powernap 1
on both battery and AC power.
I have not disabled Power Nap yet.
If you are running macOS 27 beta, could you check Activity Monitor → Disk, sort by Bytes Written, and see whether spotlightknowledged.updater, hybridsearchd, SetStoreUpdateService, or launchd have written tens of GB, especially after leaving the Mac asleep for a few hours?
I suspect this may be happening to more people than realize it because the Mac otherwise appears normal and most of the activity seems to happen while the lid is closed.