An external hard drive causes ram to go to almost zero

I have an external hard drive that has MP3 files on it. The drive is Mac formatted and whenever I turn it on, the RAM drops to about 15mb and everything becomes slow. I have transferred the MP3 files to another drive and the same thing happens.

Sounds like maybe Spotlight is Indexing the External Hard Drive.
After connecting the External Hard Drive, look up at the magnifing glass on right side of your menu bar and check to see if the dot in the middle is going on and off.
If you want the External Hard Drive Indexed so that you can use Spotlight to search for files, then allowing it to finish Indexing should free up some if not all that used RAM.
If you do not want or need the drive Indexed, then go to: Apple > System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy and add the External Hard Drive to Prevent Spotlight from searching that location:
If that is not the problem, then perhaps it is to due with the way iTunes or someother music software is setup to use the files on the drive?

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External hard drive causes Mavericks to freeze

When connecting an external hard drive Mavericks just freeze, and the only thing I can do is to do a force shutdown. The external drives are Western Digital (USB 2.0) and LaCie (Firewire 800), connected to a MBP mid 2007 4 GB RAM running OS X 10.9.5. I did a clean install of Mavericks.
I've tried to repair permissions but that didn't do the trick.
I'm totally lost here, don't know what to do, so if anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks.

An Apple Hardware Test may provide a clue:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509
Note that an error free AHT is not definitive.
In any event an appointment at an Apple store genius bar may be the best option. The diagnosis will be free regardless of the age of the MBP. You will need to bring the external HDDs with you.
Ciao.

Will using an external hard drive cause me to have duplicate files on my itunes library?

I put all my ITUNES MEDIA folder on my external hard drive from my older computer.. I recently bought a new computer and installed Itunes. I synced some of my Itunes purchased songs back on by using my Ipod.. however the songs I ripped from my cds are still not reinstalled in my library.. I will have to use my external hard drive or re rip those.. and there are a lot of them.. since I have already replaced some of the ones I purchased back on using my Ipod will it duplicate them if I use the prefrences method and return them all from my external hard drive? If i delete my files that I have already returned on my new computer before using my external will Itunes remember which are Itunes purchased music and which arent as well>??? also how exactly do you move music from an external? just plug it in and click the prefrences box about syncing files and keeping Itunes library organized?? any other thing to click?

An iTunes library consists of both the media and the database that knows which files are in the library and hold details of ratings, playcounts, playlist membership and other details not stored in each file's metadata.
Depending on how you have moved content to your external drive you may find you are only moved the media, but not the database. If you import this media into a new library it will work, but your library will be seen as "new" with respect to any devices that you have and iTunes will want to erase and reload them, losing you current selections, settings and data on the device.
These are two possible approaches that will normally work to move an existing library to a new computer.
Method 1
Backup the library with this User Tip.
Deauthorize the old computer if you no longer want to access protected content on it.
Restore the backup to your new computer using the same tool used to back it up.
Keep your backup up-to-date in future.
Method 2
Connect the two computers to the same network. Share your <User's Music> folder from the old computer and copy the entire iTunes library folder into the <User's Music> folder on the new one. Again, deauthorize the old computer if no longer required.
Both methods should give the new computer a working clone of the library that was on the old one. As far as iTunes is concerned this is still the "home" library for your devices so you shouldn't have any issues with iTunes wanting to erase and reload.
I'd recommend method 1 since it establishes an ongoing backup for your library.
If you have an iOS device that syncs with contact & calendar data on your computer you should migrate this information too. If that isn't possible create a dummy entry of each type in your new profile and iTunes should offer to merge the existing data from the device into the computer, otherwise the danger is that it will wipe the information from the device.
If your media folder has been split out from the main iTunes folder you may need to do some preparatory work to make it easier to move. See make a split library portable. Alternatively you could copy over the iTunes folder and make sure your external drive has the same drive letter on the new system as the old, however moving the library into a portable form will make every subsequent move that much easier.
Should you be in the unfortunate position where you are no longer able to access your original library, or a backup of it, then see Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device for advice on how to set up your devices with a new library with the maximum preservation of data.
tt2

Send to Final Cut Pro in Color off an external Hard Drive, causes Color to Crash

Okay, so I'm having some Color issues guys...
I'm color correcting a feature right now, and just completed the CC with Color. I did the entire color correct on an internal hard drive on a Mac Pro. My client wanted to take a look at the CC on a different machine, so I transferred all of the FCP files, Color Projects, footage, etc. (the ENTIRE directory from my machine) onto an external hard drive....
...When I opened the color project from the external drive on his machine, all of my media was gone, so of course I reconnected the media (directly from the source, the same source files I edited with in FCP), and everything was fine. My grades were there, and everything looked great....
....I rendered my Color sequence and tried to Send To Final Cut Pro, and color crashed on me. It continued to do this....
....I went back to my machine and tried to Send To Final Cut Pro, and everything worked just fine. What went wrong with the data transfer? Is that the reason Color keeps crashing? Is it because I relinked the footage in Color to the original source files? It doesn't make sense to me. All of the data from the original drive was moved to an external and relinked.
I'm pretty new to Color so any help would be appreciated. Thanks so much!
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Copy the original project and media to the external drive using Media Manager. It will maintain the links.
x

Media on new external hard drive causing problems with FCP 4.1

Hi gang
I bought a new 160 gig external hard drive due to my internal media drives becoming fairly full of media (20 gigs left on each). The external is being used only for media. I removed ownership permissions on all the media drives but now when I boot up the computer, the external won't show on the desktop (am using the encryption keys that came with the drive). If this is the case I can open any FCP project. If I can get the external drive up on the desktop (usually by switching the firewire port from back to front), then none of my FCP projects will open up (have to force quit due to "not responding"). This is drivng me nuts!!
Any ideas ??
thanks . . . .

Thanks for the replies. I bought the drive from an Apple reseller, told him it was for media storage and he sold me the drive with a Macally hardware encrypted "enclosure". I guess I could (or should have) increased the size of my three internal drives but will return this sucker as the replies I have received all indicate the encryption "feature" is one I don't need. Taking it back and thanks for the advice . . . as always this forum is extremely helpful !!
Craig

G-Raid external hard drive won't mount -- have tried almost everything!

My iMac (Intel , OSX 10.4.11) has been happily working with my G-Raid external hard drive for over a year. But now, after the computer cord was disconnected yesterday, it refuses to mount the G-Raid or recognize it anywhere. Can't find it in the Disk Utilities or under "About this mac -- Firewire." Called Apple service and tried everything the agent recommended...PRAM diagnostic reboot, power surge, plugging, unplugging...nothing helped. The problem isn't with the G-Raid, which works fine plugged into my old Powerbook with the same firewire. Grateful for any help, as I really need the G-Raid -- it's got all my projects, music, photos....

Can you plug it in with a USB cable on your iMac? That might get you through your crisis and even resurrect your Firewire connection. Accidentally breaking the connection on my external Firewire drives happens too often as the connector doesn't make a snug fit compared to USB. It's not a problem unless there was something in your buffers at the time the connection was broken. You may need to Repair the drive using Disk Utility when it eventually reconnects or all may be well without more intervention.

External hard drive causing finder to crash

The problem in a nutshell:
On 2 different occasions today, trying to open the hard drive folder (after not accessing the EHD for a couple hours) caused Finder to crash and my Macbook hung on shutdown - I had to unplug the USB hub or do a forced manual shutdown. When restarting the computer, my computer couldn't read the hard drive - I did find a way to fix that (see details below).
I don't know why this is happening in the first place or whether this indicates a bigger problem. Thus far, all data on these drives is backed up elsewhere, but I want these drives to be my backup (aside from DVD hard copies, of course). If anyone knows what may be causing this problem, I'd appreciate your help, thanks!
My system:
I have an early 2008 Macbook with OSX 10.6.8 and 4GB RAM.
Last week I bought two identical Hitachi DeskPro 3TB USB hard drives -- call them External HD A & B --, connected to my Macbook via a USB hub that has its own power source. The EHDs have their own power sources as well. All power sources are plugged into surge-protected power strips. (The EHD B is a cloned copy of the EHD A using backup software).
Each EHD is divided into 3 partitions.
In System Preferences, I did NOT choose to have the hard drive(s) go to sleep whereever possible.
Both EHDs run cool - I've never seen any sign of overheating.
Details of What Happened:
Both times, I was actively using my computer but hadn't accessed the EHD for a couple hours or so. Both times, only EHD A was present in the Finder. (EHD B was physically plugged in, but ejected from Finder, as is my ususal practice.)
Upon restart, I got a message that "a drive plugged into this computer cannot be read", giving me the option to Initialize, Ignore, or Eject. Restarting my Macbook (with one or both EHDs connected) didn't make a difference.
Neither drive showed up in Disk Utility, but they both showed up in System Profiler under USB, albeit with much fewer details than when the drives are showing up normally. The scanner attached to the USB hub has worked just fine.
Both times, the solution to the undetectable EHD problem was to plug in the drive's power source directly into the wall socket and the drive would promptly show up on my desktop. (It doesn't matter whether I plugged the USB directly into my Macbook or kept it plugged into the USB hub.) Once I do that, I can eject the drive, plug it back into the power strip, and it works just fine. I verified the drives in Disk Utility both times and they tested ok.

I'm replying to my own post here since it's far to late to update the original message: To update: after more than 6 months, I can verify that the solution given at bottom of my original post (plugging the drive directly into a wall socket) has worked every time, both in the US and in Asia. I have no idea why this is so, just that it works.

External Hard Drive Causing Spinning Beach Ball - 27" iMac

I have a brand new 27" iMac with the Core i7 processor. There are no modifications to the unit. I do however have a portable USB hard drive plugged into the unit. Now I imagine that after some time the iMac is putting the USB hard drive to sleep because of non-use. However, after I walk away from the iMac (my iMac is set to sleep after 3 hours) for 30 minutes or so and come back and start using some applications one will eventually slow down and the spinning beach ball appears. For example, when I come back to the iMac after 30 minutes and log back in and launch Mail everything is fine. Then I might launch Safari and all of a sudden the USB hard drive spins up and the spinning beach ball appears. Can someone tell me how to correct this so it does not cause these hang-ups?
Thanks in advance,
Mike

Hi Mike,
Western Digital external HDs are known for their rather 'dubious' sleep/No-sleep behaviour.
I have two older ones myself with the same oddity.
Have a look here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=300839 and maybe use the app mentioned there http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/31158/keep-drive-spinning
Regards
Stefan

External Hard Drive Causing Force quit not to work

I have 2 Lacie 500 gig FW 800 external drives daisy chained to my imac. I use one for Time Machine and one for weekly backups. After upgrading to 10.5.3 I noticed applications were freezing and I could not force quit. Today Microsoft Word froze and I noticed when I went to force quit, (holding the mouse button down on the icon to get menu) that one of my drives spun up. I disconnected the FW800 cable from my Mac and the application unfroze. Help are my drive incompatible now in 10.5.3? Is something wrong with one of my drives?

Try running repair permissions in Disk Utility on your hard drives.

External Hard Drive Won't Mount

I've got a new 500GB Toshiba external hard drive, connected to my computer via a USB. The first time I connected it, it showed up just fine, but after ejecting it, and connecting it again, it doesn't show up in Finder. I've gone to Disk Utility, and it does *show up* there; however, I can't verify or repair it (the buttons are all greyed out.) What can I do?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I am having this exact same problem with a WD hard drive, it was improperly dismounted from a Mac and i'm pretty sure the data is ok, but the partition table is corrupted. I tried diskwarrior and some other utilities without any success, although testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) was able to read the drive and could see the data, i do not have another drive to back it up to. In fact i have this exact same problem with 2 external hard drives, caused by the same thing, is anyone aware of this being a recurring bug in OSX 10.4.11? One would think that Macs being such user friendly machines they would not be so prone to causing major problems on a routine bad dismount... My windows XP machine recognized the drive, and started to mount it but hung partway through the mounting process. I will check back if i find a solution, and please if you could post any breakthroughs you might have it would be appreciated. Good luck!

Folder with Question Mark at Startup External Hard Drive

This morning on startup I received the white screen with the folder icon with the question mark inside. After unplugging an external harddrive, the computer booted without any issues.
I tried searching, but couldn't find anything on this exact topic. Can a bad external hard drive cause this issue or was the fact that I unplugged the drive and it botted fine just a random coincidence? I had been having some problems that past week or so with the external drive (it's not used in any way to boot the computer, just to store random files). I was hoping it was just something with the external drive that I can easily replace and not a bigger issue.
Has anyone else experienced this before or have any ideas on it?
Thanks for your help.

You can also reference this if you need more help then just a repair:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1440

Haw to change permission on a external hard drive?

HI,
I can't use my external hard drive cause after the upgrade to lion when I try to do it the mac says that I haven't permission to open it...
EHD: verbatim gigabit NAS external hard drive
thx

That's if you want to have permission on the drive at all.
If you want the drive to be accessible by everyone then do the following:
Highlight the disk
Command-i to get info
Click the disclosure triangle next to "Sharing & Permissions" if it's not already pointing down
Check the box "Ignore ownership on this volume"
If it's grayed out you'll have to click the little orange padlock and supply your admin credentials.

Huge .HFS+ Private Directory Data file on external hard drive

I have an external hard drive I use for storing photos and music to keep my internal hard drive less burdened. Everything works fine. In addition I have a MacBook running 10.5.6, which has been attached to the same external hard drive a few times but generally is not.
I was using WhatSize to see how my storage was being used and was surprised that 10% of my external drive (25GB) is now in a hidden folder called .HFS+ Private Directory Data. Inside the folder are over one hundred subfolders with all kinds of random stuff in them. From reading on here it seems that the folder is primarily there to tell the computer where to find things but 25GB is starting to impinge on my usable space and seems way out of proportion. The entire rest of the external hard drive only has 95GB of data, almost entirely simple iTunes and iPhoto libraries. I think I did one or two Time Machine backups from the MacBook but they are now irrelevant as I have nothing on that computer I need backed up anymore.
Is there any way to shrink that directory down without screwing everything up? It seems to be growing in a way that will render the external drive useless at some point.

Try using something like OnyX to clear the caches on the external.

My external hard drive seems to have a problem ?

movies played from my my external hard drive lag or either very slow, almost anything i open from my external lags, what does this mean ???but if i transfer them to my laptop and open them they work perfectly ! i tried to repair it but this happened .....

Streaming content from an external HD is always going to be slower than if the content is local on the SSD. Especially if you're using USB2 with hi-def content, it'll be even worse. For example, I had a 176GB copy of a 1080p movie that I tried to stream over USB2 and the movie was unplayable on my machine. It'd show 5-10 seconds of video, buffer, skip 8-10 seconds and then repeat the cycle.
Moving to FireWire 800, Thunderbolt of USB3 will definitely improve (if not completely eliminate) these problems. Otherwise for media that requires constant disk read access, you'll want to run it locally.

Large files fail when copying to external hard drive

Hi, I am trying to copy 2 extremely large dmg files (both 4-7 GB each) from my macbook to an external hard drive. When the file is almost done I get an error message saying it couldnt do it. I have heard about this happening to other people because their external harddrives were not formatted correctly or something. Is there some precedural way of doing this, if so what are the steps. Thanks.

In addition to the other suggestions, you may want to try connecting the drive directly to the MacBook. While this is probably sensitive to the exact combination of hardware, I'm finding that I have problems if I connect my drive to either my first-gen aluminum Apple Cinema Display or an external USB 2.0 hub, but no problems whatsoever if I connect it directly to one of the MacBook's two USB ports.
The exact error message you get would also be helpful.
Doug

An external hard drive causes ram to go to almost zero

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