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.

Similar Messages

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

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 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

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?

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.

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

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

External USB drive spins down after 5 minutes' idleness

Hi, all.
This new Seagate 300 GB drive is doing everything well ... except staying "up".
As long as I read from or write to it within the 5-minute period, all's well. Otherwise it spins down. (Doesn't matter which of the 3 USB ports it's connected to.)
The next data-touch brings it laboriously to life again, but I need it to stay up without interruption.
The consistent 5 minutes suggests there's a setting I'm ignorant of, but my Energy Saving settings are all "Never!"
Much obbliged for your insights ...
Ike
MBP Core Duo 2.16 2GB Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Well, from the start I carefully left that box unchecked.
But the trouble has to come from something like that, doesn't it--the period before spin-down being so unvarying? What other than Energy Saver tries to schedule things in OS X??
USB disks themselves have no scheduled shut-down features, or? (I see nothing relevant at the Seagate site.)
And this external drive is plugged into the wall, so this can't conceivably be a function of the USB port power issues we read so much about in this forum, right?
Aaaarghrgh!

Stop external disk drives spinning down

Just got a new imac 27" - dlighted with it in every way :-) 10.7.1
All my backup drives are external of course. Mostly OWC FireWire.
In the past have used SpinDownFix to keep 'em rolling so that there's no wait while they all start up every time anything needs to access the FileSystem.
But I can't help thinking there must be a better way.
Anyone know of one, please for Lion?
TUA!

Hi Mark,
Energy Saver box unchecked... and my 3 externals ( 2 x FW 800, 1 x USB ) keep spinning on my iMac...
Do your Ext HDs have any proprietary software installed on them...?
If so, this could be why they keep spinning down...
Cheers

External disk spin down

I have a OWC firewire 800 external hard drive. I want to know if there is a way that I can keep it from spinning down so that info can be accessed more readily. After all what's the point of having a high speed external if it has to spin up every time I want to access it?

Go to system preferences / energy saver / sleep and uncheck put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

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

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.

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.

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

External drives spin down & up frequently

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for