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

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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

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

Hard drive spins down and have to do a hard reboot

I have an Intel iMac 3.06 (April 2008). Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard especially when I am using itunes (9.02) (downloading) the hard drive spins down for no reason at all.The energy settings are fine. The only option I have is to hold the power button down for 5 sec and reboot when it happens. I know this has been an issue with other intel iMacs but when the "fix" for other machines was available it said my machine did not need it. I beg to differ. This is getting very annoying as I am sure it is not doing the hard drive any good having to hard reboot all the time.
I have tried the power management reset which has not resolved the problem.

Hi David
Welcome to Apple Discussions
1. In the Energy Saver preference try setting Computer sleep: to "Never" and make sure the the box "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is unchecked.
2. Try resetting the System Management Controller as described in the article below.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543
Now then if you are still having a problem you might also:
1. Use the Restore Default button on the Energy Saver preference panel and then reselect your sleep settings.
or
2. Go to: Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration and trash the "com.apple.PowerManagement.plist" which also restore's the Energy Saver preference to default, then go back to the Energy Saver preference and reselect your sleep settings.
Dennis

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.

Hard Drive Spin Down....Good or Bad??

'Two questions, really, but first some background. I have an earlier Mac Pro running 10.7.3 (as I recall). I also have a Sonos music system. All the hard drive bays in the Mac Pro are occupied. The first has a 2 TB Western Digital RE that has my OS and all my files on it. Bay's 2 and 3 have two 3TB drives from Hitachi which are mirrored and serve as my internal daily backup which is run and cloned by CCC. The fourth drive is another RE that has copies of all my music. I simply copy my two iTunes folders and any other music I want the Sonos system to access to this fourth drive. My reason for doing this is that I wanted to minimize the run time of my main hard drive as not so long ago, I had two Seagate drives go belly up on me. All the music on the fourth drive (that serves the Sonos system) comes from my main hard drive which is backed up to the two mirrored internal drives as well as a G-Technolgy mirrored external drive, so I'm not concerned with backing up the drive serving the Sonos system. So......
Question one is: Which is better for drives in general, to keep them spinning all the time, or to allow or force them to spin down if they aren't being accessed?
Question two is: If it is better to spin down a drive, how can I selectively spin down some drives and not others?
For instance, I'm thinking that it is better to spin drives down, then I'd like to be able to spin down drive #1 with my OS but not the Sonos drive because the Sonos system prefers that the drive not spin down or there are connection errors.
Thanks for all your answers and suggestions!

I understand the limitions of mirrored drives, but my main drive is not mirrored. What is mirrored are my backup drives. One daily backup onto mirrored drives in bay's 3 and 4 in the Mac Pro. And a less frequent backup on mirrored drives that are stored in a fireproof safe in the garage. Should my main, non-mirrored drive fail (hopefully it'll be a long time as it's an enterprise class drive), I've then got any one of four cloned drives to choose from. Of course, I would choose the most recent ones that are internal, but should something catastrophic like a fire occur, I'd then have two identical cloned and bootable drives in the garage.
I recognize that in the case of a real catastrophy, the drives in the garage won't be as current as the drives in the Mac Pro, but in both cases, the backups themselves are pretty robust because they are mirrored. If one backup drive fails, the other will likely be fine and I can then easily proceed from there.
It set up properly, mirrored drives offer some great redundency in case of hard drive failure. What prompted me to go this route was three drive failures in one year, all of which were Seagate Barracuda drives and relatively new. And two of them were backup drives. My backup drives are now Hitachi and mirrored in case one dies. And CCC makes it so I can just plug the backup drive into my #1 bay and I'm back up in business. Except for MS Office which somehow limits the number of times it can be cloned and you have to call MS and get a new product code. Easy to do, but a pain. I learned this as a result of swapping cloned drives in and out of my wife's MacBook. It all worked perfectly until I did it once too many times and MS wouldn't load. Hence the call to MS.
Thanks for all your feedback!
Oh, and any info on controling which drives spin down and which don't?

Thunderbolt Drives won't spin down and sleep in Mountain Lion

In Lion when I put my iMac to sleep, the external Thunderbolt Drives would spin down and sleep as well. In Mountain Lion, when I put my iMac to sleep, the external Thunderbolt drives do NOT spin down and sleep. Can anyone confirm or duplicate this issue?

I have the same behavior, however I'm using the TB to FW800 adapter. I have 6 FW800 drives in a chain. All would sleep when MBP was put to sleep under 10.8.5 (ironically fixed after 10.8.4, now broken in 10.9).
Seeing the same issue with native TB drives makes me think it's a problem with TB software in general.

PB17 internal drive spins down during bootup; computer shuts down

my internal hard drive has crashed 3 times in the last week, each time on boot-up during the grey screen spinning wheel mode. the wheel will stop spinning, and simultaneously i can hear the internal drive spin down, then the computer shuts down on its own. i am able to boot from any external bootable hard drive.
when i boot from any external drive, the internal drive does not mount. when launching the utility Drive Genius from the external drive, the internal drive still doesn't mount but does list the drive in the list of volumes/device window and does list the details of the drive. the drive is listed with its BSD name, not its DisplayName.
Drive Genius is able to DUPLICATE the internal drive, and i'm able to boot from that duplication. if i select REPAIR, Drive Genius goes thru it's process of examining but is never able to actually repair the drive. for each time that the drive has crashed, if i select the REBUILD option, even though it always reports back that it was unable to repair the drive, when finished with the report, the drive mounts automatically with the correct volume display name. i am then able to boot from the internal drive, and everything works fine...till the next crash.
Apple's disk utility hasnt been any help, although i've repaired permissions successfully after recovering from each crash.
any thoughts?

If your drive happens to be failing, then there is nothing that any software application can do to fix it. Maybe you should boot from the Install & Restore DVD that came with your PowerBook holding down the Option key, and run Apple Hardware Test to see if that provides any insight....
Have you considered reformatting the PB's drive and reinstalling your system?
Good luck.

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.

Easy question I'm sure. imac hard full (500gb) mostly from iphoto. no capacity left. what are my options? I've thought of an external drive of 1tb and then a 2nd external drive of 3tb to back up both???? please help.

easy question I'm sure. imac hard full (500gb) mostly from iphoto. no capacity left. what are my options? I've thought of an external drive of 1tb and then a 2nd external drive of 3tb to back up both???? please help.

Those are the options - more space is more space.
Moving the iPhoto Library is simple:
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD

I think I have blown out my USB ports. Plugged eternal drive to USB port; drive also had an AC plug which I plugged in. Screen went white; unplugged external drive (both USB and AC plug). Restarted MAC Pro. Everything came back except USB ports

I think I have blown out my USB ports. Plugged in an external drive to USB, but drive also had an AC connection which I connected. Whole screen went white; unplugged external drive (both AC and USB) and shut down MacPro. Restarted and everything came back except access to USB ports. Have tried to reset PRAM and SMC. No success. Have I blown out the electronic circuitry to my USB ports?

Thanks for the response, but ironically enough, I feel really stupid after posting that because a couple minutes after posting that my DELL mouse started working again, but I honestly don't know how long that'll last. After it started working again, I tried switch which port it's plugged into again, and the other one (the one closest to me) still isn't working. If it stops working again (which it probably will), I'll definitely take it to the Apple Store. But, for some reason almost every time I take a device to the Apple Store, it fixes the problem itself when I get there, and then stops working after I leave (like just now.)
That's happened a couple times, like when my computer was heating up alot, and when my phone's sound kept shutting off by itelf.
Anyways, I want to keep this discussion up just because I know it'll stop working soon. But, yeah, I was planning on taking it to the Apple Store anyways, but I think the earliest I can is probably Saturday or Sunday, so I'll do that then.
Thanks for the response!
Scott

Hard drive spin down - good or bad for the drives

Having had a few drives fail recently, I've started to wonder about the whole issue of the energy saver preference for having hard drives spin down. I've always had it disabled because it seems to be generally believed that that's the way to work on a fcp (or avid for that matter) editing system. But now that I've started imagining every drive failing, I'm wondering whether it makes sense to perhaps have another user account that I switch to for nonediting moments in which the spin down option is enabled.
Any opinions out there?

Drive manufacturors report a MTBF (mean time between failures) often in the 200,000 hours range. This works out to something like 22 years. Drives that fail in less time than that are often subjected to three things:
- heat
- voltage irregularities - spikes or brownouts
- physical shocks
oh, and did I mention heat?
As drive RPM increases, so does energy consumption and heat. The best thing you can do for drives is to keep them in a cool, well ventilated location and to put them on a conditioned power supply.
FWIW, I have scsi drives that are over 10 years old running everyday with no issues.
Spindown seems to be an energy saver issue but I wonder about the cycle of powering down and back up over and over and over. It seems like that would put much more stress on bearings, motors and the like.
good luck.
x

My USB ports will not recognize any devices, iPhone or external drives. Keyboard and printer work, any suggestions?

My USB ports will not recognize any devices, iPhone or external drives. Keyboard and printer work, any suggestions?

I'd start by looking in system profiler.
the blue Apple icon > About this Mac > More info...
goto the hardware section. Scroll down and click on USB
See what happens when you have the device plugged in & not plugged in.
Move keyboard & mouse around to verify that ports work. Plug device in a port that worked with keyboar or mouse. Keyboard usb ports are rather low power.
Perhaps device is taking too much power. Are devices power or unpowered? Try connecting devices to a usb hub.
Which mac do you have?
What iMac do you have?
Report system info
Blue apple > about this Mac
click on more info
click on hardware
do not copy your serial number

My hard drive melted down and I don't have my serial number to reinstall my copy of Flash CS5.5. How can I reacquire it?

my hard drive melted down and had to be replaced. I don't have my serial number or the email from it to reinstall my copy of Flash CS5.5. how do I get a new one? Can someone just verify my purchase and email me a new one?

Does your serial number show on your account page?
https://www.adobe.com/account.html for serial numbers on your Adobe page
If the above doesn't work...
This is an open forum, not Adobe support.. you need Adobe staff support to help
Adobe contact information - http://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html
-Select your product and what you need help with
-Click on the blue box "Still need help? Contact us"

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

Did you empty the Trash?
What size hard drive & how much free space. You should always have a minimum of 10-15% or more free space?
 Cheers, Tom

External drives spin down and up on their own??

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