External USB Polling


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I have put up with this one for quite some time now and don't really care about it, but figured I would put up a question regarding it...

I have a DVD recorder in an external enclosure plugged into my Mid '07 iMac and I would say randomly about every 2-10 minutes the drive makes noise like the laser head is moving forward and back really quick as if it is being polled by the computer. As I am using a cheap one (Lite-On), it is a bit loud. Enough so that if the room is quiet, and I am across the room, I can hear it. While this is a bit of a conversation starter when someone comes over and hears it, I got to wondering if this was normal or not. ..

I can unplug the drive from the USB and it shuts down sans the internal fan inside the enclosure which is powered by the mains. This will prevent the polling of course. However, I need it to be plugged into USB to make it work.

Here's the kicker, I did go into Boot Camp as I knew virtualization wouldn't be a good indicator, and it didn't make that noise.

So, this brings the question, is this something in Mac OS X that set to make it poll the drives every so often? At this point :iiam: to me.

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