External Drive Spin-Ups

Ever since installing Leopard, my external (backup, using SuperDuper) hard drive spins up on a regular basis throughout the day, then spins down after being "active" for about 10 minutes. I have Time Machine turned OFF so don't think that's the cause. Does Leopard spin up external drives periodically for some reason?
Thanks,
WK

Unfortunately, if you set the Energy Saver option to spin down drives whenever possible, the OS will then spin up all sleeping drives regardless of which drive is actually being accessed. You can turn off this option in Energy Saver but that may not help because some drives seem to sleep on their own depending upon their individual firmware. OS X has no way to put a single drive to sleep or to wake up regardless of the state of any other drive on the bus.

Similar Messages

Errant External Drive Spin-Ups

I've had this problem since system 8 or so, but I'm finally aggravated enough to seek help.
Every once in a while, some errant action (e.g. launching an app or opening a file or window) will cause my external hard drive to spin up from sleep, slowing down my system for ten secs or so. It happens even if the hard drive has nothing to do with the items/apps I'm handling. It's random.
These days, my external drive is mounted 24/7 so it can fulfill its Time Machine duties, so this is starting to get really annoying. If I dismount the drive to avoid this problem, then I'll have foiled my backup scheme.
Ideas?

Nope. I have the same issues but my machine sits and waits for 4 drives to spin up, and I'd swear they do it one at a time

External drives spin down and up on their own??

Suddenly my external drives are acting very strange.
They go to sleep within 3 minutes??
This happens only a few minutes after the last time I access them.
I do not remember this happening prior to SL.
I did a fresh install a second time on a brand new system drive- and I still get this issue with my externals shutting down and having to spin up.
My FW800 take a long time to spin up and I get the beachball.
What is going on?

Perhaps a basic question but is "Sys Pref" - "Energy Saver" - "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" enabled?
Perhaps try Topher's tip in this article (setting no spindown time via Terminal)?
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346924-263.html
/p

External Drives Spinning Down

Greetings All;
Although the upgrade to Mountain Lion went without a hitch on all of my machines, since the upgrade my external firewire drives spin down when not in use.
They do spin back up after a few seconds when accessed. This obviously isn't a major issue...just wondering if anyone else has experience this. Any thoughts? All the best....
Syd Rodocker
Apple iTunes U Administrator
Tennessee State Department of Education
Tennessee's Electronic Learning Center

Joe;
Thanks for the response! Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I have multiple FCP editing systems and a couple of iMac's for graphics work, so I've now begun only powering up the drives that I need for the day's current project. Interesting development. All the best...
Syd Rodocker
Apple iTunes U Administrator
Tennessee State Department of Education
Tennessee's Electronic Learning Center

Selective external drive spin-up

I have an external FW drive that is used exclusively as the backup destination for SuperDuper. When it's not in use then it spins down and goes to sleep. Which is what you'd expect. However, whenever I want to save any files from any programs, the Mac powers up this external drive with the inevitable delay.
Is there any way to prevent this?
TIA

Unmount it?
Not totally joking either; SuperDuper can run pre- and post-backup shell scripts.
diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk1
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
(Where /dev/disk1 is the physical address of your external; you can find it using "diskutil list".)
I have no idea if there's a hidden preference to mitigate this spin-up, there could easily be; this is just what I would do. And I prefer leaving disks unmounted when they're not in use, since there's much less chance of filesystem corruption if a cable gets pulled accidentally or I lose power.

Lion time machine - external drive spin up causing apps to crash

I have a 1TB external drive set up for time machine backups on my 27" iMac running Lion 10.7.3 that seems to be causing my Adobe CS 5.5 suite of apps (photoshop in partiucular) to crash as the drive spins up. If an adobe application or lion/time machine is asking the drive to spin up I have no idea, but it seems random, and when it does, the adobe app(s) freeze and the beach ball from **** just spins. All other applications remain uneffected which leads me to believe it's related to a scratch disk function of some sort. I've googled high and low to find an scrap on insight into this issue and have found nothing...
Few questions:
• Why does the time machine external drive randomly spin up even though there are no backup processes running?
• Why would an adobe app would need to access an external drive?
Before anyone says it, I know I can always just eject the drives, but I'd rather keep my backups running for obvious reasons. If a complete wipe and install is the only solution recommended by the doctor, I will. It's just maddening to regularly loose work. Any help is greatly appreciated!
iMac: Mid 2010 27"
Processor 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50)
Adobe CS 5.5
Photoshop CS5 / v12.1 x64
Illustrator CS5 / v15.1.0
InDesign CS5.5 / v7.5.2
External Drives
Firewire800: 2TB Hitachi G-Drive: http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm
USB: 1TB Western Digital MyPassport 0730

Set the TM drive not to spin down, I think there is a setting in the system preferences.
Could be the G drive feature,
consider making option key bootable clone drives
Most commonly used backup methods explained

Random CD Drive spin ups.

Well i have 2 cd drives, the internal one and an external LaCie cd drive, both currently have CD's in them. Intermittently the CD drives spin up even when i'm not doing anything with the CD's and they can stay that way for 5 or even 8 minutes. While this is happening the eject is very slow in responding on the external drive. But the internal will eject instantly.
Is anyone else having this problem? Does anyone know the cause?

Are you running any applications which open a file "open" window? If anything scans the disk bus, and the CD drives have CDs in them, this will scan the bus. So this would be something like "save as..." or open a file or something.

External drives spin down & up frequently

Firewire Seagate 250 GB HD used to spin down after periods of no access, but now it is always spinning and never sleeps. I didn't do anything -- that I recall -- to make the drive stay "awake".
The current symptom: every few minutes (15? 30? it's difficult to time it) I hear the drive start to spin down, but it doesn't get far before it spins back to full speed. The entire spastic sleep-OH NO DON'T episode takes about 3 seconds.
I checked the Sys Prefs>Energy Saver settings: "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is checked; "Wake for Ethernet administrator access" is un-checked; and there are no scheduled wake-ups or sleeps.
I did recently upgrade to 10.5.6, but I can't say whether this symptom started before or after the upgrade.
Anyone else have this experience? Why would this have changed? How do I get the drives back again to their sleepy nature?
Thanks,
NP
Mac Intel Mini 1.83 GHz / 2 GB / 230 GB (internal)
OS X 10.5.6

Maybe here,Question on OS X Notebook Hard Drive Load Cycle Rates
No, not directly related to my issue.
Thanks, though.

External drives spinning up on Mac Mini wake up

These are IOMega MiniMax hard drives. When the Mini goes to sleep, they stay on. But when the Mini wakes up, they all turn off, then on. I figure it's OS X re-mounting them. Is there no way of getting around that, because it's not good for the hard drives to spin down/up so often.

They should be fine and won't use as much electricity that way.
If you are concerned enough to do something different the use of a powered USB or FireWire hub, depending on the bus, will keep them from powering down when the Mac does.

External hard drive spinning down (and up) on it's own

I thought my 5 month old external 1tb dual drive was dying at first, but now am seeing a pattern. There is a forum over at macrumors about this. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=445690
I always make sure in my energy settings i have spin down external drives unchecked, because it's known that spin downs and ups can cause drives to fail sooner. Yet I now find my external drive spinning down whenever it's not in use while I'm sitting at my computer, and i hear it spin up at the most random times, even when i'm not using my computer. sometimes in the middle of the night. This did not happen in tiger.
It's connected by firewire 800. At first I thought it was time machine but others in the macrumors forum claim it isn't that. I almost think its network activity. I'm considering using an applescript to access the drive every 5 or ten minutes automatically yet not do anything just to see if this stops it from spinning it down. I do consider this an annoyance and would hope apple will figure out what it is very soon, before it causes any detriment to the life of my expensive drive.

did you ever find a fix for this?
my ext FW800 drives constantly spin down, then when i do something later i get the beachball until they spin back up

How to prevent external drive from spinning up? Or, fastest quiet drive on spin up?

My external drive insists on spinning up often without reason, often for open/save dialog boxes. The spin up takes time and the computer is inoperable until it completes the spin up. As a fast touch typist, who often hits command-s to save documents in Word, this is really a nuisance. This happens with a USB and Firewire external drives. It seems to be a feature within the OS itself--and likely some other programs in the background--that want to access drives.
Is there any way of turning this behavior off? For example, telling the OS to spin up the external hard drive only for a specific application (Carbon Copy Cloner). So far, the only solution I've come up with is to eject the external drives, which isn't much of a solution if one wants automatic back ups!
Now, if there is no way of turning this off, are there drives that spin up quickly? This USB drive I have takes forever compared to the Firewire one, which also takes too long. At the same time, though, the USB drive has the blessing of running silently whereas the various Firewire drives I've had are noisy (with high pitched hums) even when idle. (I realize that the noise has more to do with the enclosures, fans, heat sink, etc.)
Quiet matters most, so if necessary, I'll just keep the external drives disconnected.

In the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences, make sure "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is not checked. This will keep your external drives spinning, so you won't be delayed waiting for them to spin up.
"I realize that the noise has more to do with the enclosures, fans, heat sink, etc."
Yes, many if not most enclosures amplify whatever noise the drive inside makes. Your desk or table may also serve as a sounding board for your drives. Setting them on something that absorbs the vibration can help, as long as you don't obstruct any cooling air intakes or outlets.
Right now, your external drives are spinning up whenever the OS is asked to display all the possible places for things to be found or stored. I don't know of any way to limit that behavior other than unmounting the disks you don't want displayed.
Spinup time is generally shorter for 2.5" drives than for the much heavier 3.5" drives — there's just less inertia to overcome as things get moving. And 2.5" drives can also be quieter, because less mass is spinning and any tiny imbalance that might cause extra vibration is correspondingly less significant.

Getting external drive only to spin-up with timemachine

Hi. I'm using TimeMachineEditor to schedule my backups as every hour is annoying. Even more annoying is that my external drive spins up every time I sit down. So, my question: how can get my external drive to spin-up only when TimeMachine wants to do a backup. It seems unnecessary that it spins all the time otherwise.
Thanks.

Nope, that doesn't make any difference. I had already tried that one out... Plus, it would not be a full solution because one needs Spotlight to search for files in Time Machine's backups (it's one of its features)... From what I can see now, it's really a OS X / Finder problem or something related to Time Machine. The problem started to manifest itself when the backup disk became relatively full (I have still some 60+ GB left, though) and/or with the latest upgrade to 10.5.2. And it seems to get worse: first the external HD spun up every 15 minutes, now every 8... I just wish somebody knew how to find out what program or process causes the IORegistry log to be updated at exactly the time when the backup disk wakes up - every 8 minutes.

UPS Energy Saver on MacBook Pro for External Drives

A search here has shown this topic come up before -- such as at https://discussions.apple.com/message/1886738#1886738 and https://discussions.apple.com/message/8162836#8162836 -- but I can't find a resolution, so I'm bringing it up again.
I have multiple FW drives connected to my MacBook Pro. The MBP is connected to an APC Back-UPS RS 1200. OSX does not make the UPS Energy Saver autoshutdown preferences available on the MBP, the reasoning being that a laptop shouldn't need UPS autoshutdown because it has its own battery which is likely to run for far longer than the UPS would.
That's all well and good for the MBP itself, but it doesn't account for the multiple FW drives which are attached to it for backups and other purposes. In the event of a power outage, without UPS autoshutdown, the UPS will run down, and the drives will abruptly power off, exposing them to potential data loss and damage.
It's also not a solution to suggest that I manually power things down once there's a power outage, because the power can go out while I'm away for more than the few minutes of UPS battery back up time. The only real solution is to have UPS autoshutdown available on all portable machines. Unless and until Apple offers a (surely very simple) OS update to make that happen, I'm still interested in a solution.
APC's own software for autoshutdown stopped being updated long ago, so there is no version compatible with Snow Leopard.
The only potential solution I've found so far is http://www.apcupsd.org/ -- but its documentation is overwhelming and it appears that it may need other supporting software, a fair amount of Terminal usage, etc., all making it not very user-friendly for the very simple usage I'd want to make of it.
Does anyone know of any other solutions, software that can run on a MBP to add UPS autoshutdown functionality?
Re: Apcups, is anyone using it successfully on a MBP? If so, does anyone know if the version listed here -- http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/Apcupsd.shtml -- is a simple application that I can easily install and configure like regular Mac apps? If yes, then I'll likely be very happy with no need for the following question. If no, can anyone provide simple instructions to set up Apcupsd to do what I want?

"You are not doing anything on the computer so no files should be writing to the drives."
Big assumption there. With today's notebooks so capable of acting as desktop substitutes, they are often left running unattended to complete demanding tasks overnight or while the user does other things.
To be able to suspend such activities and gracefully power down an external drive or drives in the event of a power outage, the Mac would have to have instructions from each third-party application or process that is running about how to interrupt its activity safely and without jeopardizing the integrity of whatever hard disk directories are in use. Then it would need to unmount the drive(s) and, if they were bus-powered drives, turn off the power to each of them at the port to which it was connected. I bet it would be possible for all app developers to write such instructions into their apps' code, but where's the incentive for them to do so? This isn't a feature that most users would gladly pay extra for, I suspect, and the cost of adding it to apps that don't have it now and testing it for reliability and proper function under all conceivable circumstances would not be trivial.
If the drive(s) were AC-powered, the computer wouldn't be able to power them down itself -- the UPS would have to do that, or simply leave them on and power them until its battery was depleted or the AC was restored. It wouldn't matter which happened as far as the drives and their contents were concerned, because once the computer stopped using them, powering them off would be safe at any time.

Trying to copy ANY file from my MacBook Pro to an external hard drive spins for 45 minutes then fails. I hate this computer and WISH I never would have wasted my money. Any ideas? WD My Passport 2TB Drive, had to buy a program to make the POS write

Trying to copy ANY file from my MacBook Pro to an external hard drive spins for 45 minutes then fails. I hate this computer and WISH I never would have wasted my money. Any ideas? WD My Passport 2TB Drive, had to buy a program to make the POS read files. Copies that would take seconds from a Windows based machine never complete. I have to close the transfer or shut off the machine half the time. Worst computer I have EVER owned, crashes non-stop, constantly freezes, and seems like EVERY operation is more complicated with this thing. Literally, my 1997 Compaq was FAR MORE reliable and user friendly.

This is one of the messages I keep getting; The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in -- File Whatever -- can’t be read or written.(Error code -36)
I have copied things to the hard drive in the past, but it has always been incredibly slow, and now just seems to freeze and fail

How to restore my back-ups to a external drive

I recently installed a external usb 2.0 hard drive to my macbook pro.
I changed my Itunes media files location to said new drive and did the files - Library - Organize Library. But what I really need is to restored from backup DVD's to this new location My DVD back-ups do I have all my content I want to get into the external drive (that has enough space to hold all the media). I was running out of room on the laptop so I would delete movies that I don't watch all the time (as I have a backup copy on DVD) download more media. Repeat the process a few more times until I finally broke down and purchased this external drive to stop the madness.
But each time I put in my DVD backup it wants to restore to the laptop (even with new media location set). Any work around? Or
WIll I have to restore from DVD to laptop, and do a library consolidating process to get the media to the external drive.

Hello Jayrajjpatel,
It sounds like you have a Time Machine backup on an external drive that you would like to use to restore your computer. The following article will help you get that done, named:
OS X Mavericks: Recover your entire system
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14185
If you’re restoring your system because of a problem with your startup disk, repair or replace the disk before following these instructions.
Make sure your Time Machine backup disk is connected and turned on. If your disk is on a network, make sure your Mac is on the same network.
Choose Apple menu > Restart. Once your Mac restarts (and the gray screen appears), hold down the Command (⌘) and R keys.
Select “Restore from a Time Machine Backup,” then click Continue.
Do one of the following:
External backup disk: Select it, then click Continue.
Time Capsule: Choose your network from the AirPort menu on the right side of the menu bar, and then select your Time Capsule and click “Connect to Remote Disk.”
Network backup disk: Select it, then click “Connect to Remote Disk.”
If necessary, enter the name and password you use to connect to your backup disk, then click Connect.
Select the date and time of the backup you want to restore, then follow the onscreen instructions.
After you restore your system, Time Machine may perform a full backup at the next scheduled backup time. This is normal. Time Machine resumes incremental backups after the full backup is completed.
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
All the very best,
Sterling

External Drive Spin-Ups

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