External Hard Drive Spinning Up


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Hey

I have an external hard drive attached to my imac and everytime i right click something after a period of inactivity it spins the damn thing up and i get a beachball for a number of seconds, is their anyways i can keep the disk active so this stops?

Richard

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What type of external drive is it? My external drive never sleepa, but that is probably due to the fact its attached via a usb to sata cable, not a store bought accessory.

Id be more inclined to blame the manufacture. Have you checked disk utilities or power management?

Hope this isn't what's happened to you http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html

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I used to have that problem with hard drives that were programmed by the factory to spin down as a power saver such as the WD green drives. I had a Toshiba external that did that as well. I found that more often than not, when they would spin down, Mac OS X would not sense that and think it was not ejected properly.

I turned around and returned the external drive, and put a 1TB drive in an always on enclosure. Sure, it runs the drive constantly, but when I am not using it, I eject it and power it off overnight, so it is not on 24/7.

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Granted it is a wd disk I want it to stay spinning and not spin down I am sure i saw a script for something like this but for the life of me can't find it anywhere

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I'm not so sure I can add anything useful to this thread, but I have an external drive hooked up to my Macbook. My Macbook has a broken screen, so it's hooked into a 37" screen and never moves, so the external drive is plugged in at all times. It's used as my Time Machine disk, so I frequently hear it spinning back up to run a backup, then cutting power when it's done. What's different though, is that mine never slows down my system when it spins back up. It just spins up and does it's work in the background.

If you're having trouble with it, try going into System Preferences, then Energy Saver, and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". That should stop it from doing that if it's bothering you.

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The problem with that MasterC is that the built in sleep modes on the External hard drives like WD and Toshiba override that setting as the Mac won't write to the drive or access it on a regular basis when it is idle. The script(s) in the MacOSXhints link take care of that in the touching of one or two files dedicated to be touched. (Sounds kinky sorry)

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The problem with that MasterC is that the built in sleep modes on the External hard drives like WD and Toshiba override that setting as the Mac won't write to the drive or access it on a regular basis when it is idle. The script(s) in the MacOSXhints link take care of that in the touching of one or two files dedicated to be touched. (Sounds kinky sorry)

Well that's dumb. They need to fix that :p

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Well that's dumb. They need to fix that :p

Tell you what why can't someone make an app that does this so people that have no idea how to do this tip can actually work it out....i use step by step guides it is just how i roll.....can anyone point me in the right direction of getting this cron working?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Tell you what why can't someone make an app that does this so people that have no idea how to do this tip can actually work it out....i use step by step guides it is just how i roll.....can anyone point me in the right direction of getting this cron working?

IIRC there is a tool like hdparm (but the sata version of it which IIRC is sdparm) which one could disable the power saving feature of the drive and I remember using it years ago; I'm sure with a bit of searching you'll be able to find it.

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