Macintosh HD not powering down. Yours may be running 24 hrs a day like mine did.

Question

This is my second attempt to inform this forum of a hidden problem I've found with my hard drive continuously spinning for no reason.
My 5 year-old domestic iMAC Macintosh HD disc drive burnt out, literally. After removing it and taking it apart, I found foam rubber had burnt over a small chip.
I replace it with an external drive (re-named it Machintosh HD) and restored my system via Time Machine.
After some time, I noticed the drive's light was on in the morning after it had not been used all night! The screen was black.
Investigation using Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Application Monitor.app) showed that writes (red lines) were made to the disc before it had time to shut-down. I don't know if it's an OS 10.6 or a hard-drive specified time-out to power down, but the writes were before then, so it never shut-down.
WORD 2004
This was the first I found to cause the problem. Is it a Microsoft or Apple OS problem, I don't know. What happens is that even with no documents open, just Word open, a small amount of Data is written before the drive can power down, so it's continously spinning (I've felt the vibrations and heard it running). Thus, when I was doing a lot of Word processing a few years ago, I left it open for days-on-end without knowing the hard drive was continously running (24x7). No wonder it burnt-out.
SAFARI
This is another source of the problem that I've found. Sometime it's a problem, sometimes it's not. However, it appears that it does depend upon what activity Safari is doing, eg flashing, blinking, what-ever. Haven't tracked it down as I'm happy to just shut it down when not needed when it no longer is a problem.
Maybe this is still an issue with OS 10.7 (Lion), Microsoft Excel, Power Point 2004 or newer versions of them and Word. I don't know.
You may need to check it out so your drive doesn't prematurely pack-up like mine did.

Answer 1

Agree 100%!  There seems to be no helpful instructions on how to manage Sharing & Permissions using the GetInfo panel. I'd like to ensure that my user files are only readable by myself. If I log in with my Admin name and password on Partition #1 and open my home folder, I find that Myself, Staff and Everyone has Read/Write privileges, by default. Is that stupid, or what?
I think so, because if I reboot as admin from Partition #2 that has its own, separate Snow Leopard system, I find to my dismay that I can still see virtually all of the contents of Partition #1, including all of my Partition #1 Admin home folder files!
Again rebooting from Partition 1, when I getinfo on my admin home folder, I could set myself to Read & Write, and set 'Staff' and 'Everyone' to "No Access".
But in the English language, "everyone" means EVERYONE, (which also includes MYSELF, right???) So, if I set Everyone to "No Access", will it remove MY read & write access?  Or, If "everyone" REALLY means "everyone else", why didn't they simply call it "everyone else" in the first place?
Next question: Who is "Staff"?  Does that include Everyone, or some sub-set of Everyone?  Am I, as Admin, part of "Staff"? But it gets even worse: Who is "Unknown User"?  I see this appear, sometimes. Really, this is enough to drive a person to consume multiple Margaritas...!!!