External Hard-Drive Constant Activity!

I have a WD 500gig external drive hooked up to my Macbook. Recently I have been having issues where the drive has constant activity (i.e. something is accessing it constantly and putting a load on it).
I have music, videos, photos etc.. so for example if I were to play a song in iTunes (my music is on the drive) iTunes slows right down because the drive is really slow.
I have tried closing all apps and seeing what happens, still light keeps flashing and something is accessing it. Then I opened Activity Monitor.. I did not see any abnormalities on what would be accessing the drive from there.
Then I thought there were errors on the drive.. so for the sake of I fired up DiskWarrior ran checks, fixes etc etc. Still after that something is still loading it right down!.
Any thoughts? The type of load on it is like it is being backed up.. or something is constantly sending info to it or receiving info from it.
There is no apps on the drive, just general data.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

If you don't want to index the drive then open Spotlight preferences, click on the Privacy tab, then drag the disk icon into the list. Spotlight will stop indexing the drive. However, you will not be able to do Spotlight searches on the drive unless the drive is indexed. If you're OK with that then no problem. Otherwise, you will have to wait for indexing to complete. Note that if you continue using the drive Spotlight will pause until the drive becomes available, but this will slow down the time it takes to complete indexing the drive.
If the drive is a USB drive then expect indexing to take much longer than for a Firewire drive. If you let the computer index the drive without you using the computer then indexing will go faster. Otherwise it will just take its own sweet time during which your computer and use of that drive will slow down.

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    A Finder drag-and-copy from the internal to the external drive will not capture invisible files (Unix systems quite literally have tens of thousands of invisible files), and copying the System and Library folders in particular will then yield unusable folders. Use SuperDuper or CCC. You can (probably) use the Finder to copy /Users if you like.
    Non-support of SMART status is a pain if you ever need to troubleshoot the external drive but won't affect normal use.
    Mounted disk images (which appear as drive icons on the Desktop) cannot be moved into a folder, only ejected from the desktop. If you're referring to the drive icons from the external drive partitions, those remain on the Desktop until the external drive is ejected. As mentioned, you can set the Finder preferences to hike all hard drive icons by unchecking the appropriate checkbox. If you're also referring to mounted disk images created after clciking on a disk image .dmg file, those also stay on the Desktop while mounted. You can move disk image files (the file icons, ending in .dmg) which when double-clicked create the disk images into a folder and copy that folder of .dmg files to where ever you have room to put it. Check that the copied .dmg disk image files will create a mounted disk image when double-clicked; you can then delete the original .dmg files to free room on the internal HD.

  • Buying an external hard drive

    I just learned that memory and hard disk capacity are not the same thing. Anyway, since I've just increased my memory from 2 to 4 GB, while since my computer is now telling me that my "Starter Drive?" is full, I've decided to buy an external hard drive for my MacBook. However, since I don't know anything about them, I'd like to read a good article or two on selecting one before making my purchase, so I came here to see if anyone has any ideas on the subject. Can anyone make any suggestions?
    I don't want to spend more than $150, preferably much less. Also, I want one that is EASY and SIMPLE to use. There will probably be other considerations, but not until I get some basic information on types, features, usages, etc.

    lenn5 wrote:
    There's only a couple things I think about when purchasing an external drive.
    1. How much space do I need.
    The minimum right now seems to be around 320GB for most people. That's what I have and it's fine more my needs. I don't edit video so I don't need a huge drive.
    2. What type of connection: Firewire, USB2, eSATA or a combination of them.
    Mine has Firewire800/USB2. It comes with a FW 400 adapter so it works with my iMacCore Duo. I wouldn't get an external without Firewire. USB2 only is too slow.
    3. Brand.
    That's up to the buyer. I chose Western Digital Studio drive. I'm mostly happy with it. Nice enclosure but is alittle noisy in a quiet room.
    Most of the top drives are good. OWC, WD, G-Tech, LaCie ect.
    Just do a search using the brand and review. There are alot of reviews on the net.
    4.Price
    Individual preference.
    I've probably missed something but these are what's important to me.
    lenn
    Thanks. I have decided to buy one, but I just have to do more thinking about what to buy. At first, being a beginner, I was just thinking in terms of capacity (bigger must be better), but now that even Terrabytes can be obtained at reasonable prices, I question that. I haven't yet read anything that completely answered the question for me, but I will be reading more comparisons and buying guides in the near future. One thing I'm still thinking about is how to use it. Will it be better to use it for storage, or do I want it to be an active part of my computer. I might add that the main reason I want to get one is to improve the speed and efficiency of my computer. I've seen many, many articles that warned of the catastrophe of crashing discs, but that doesn't worry me. The first time that happened, I felt like I had lost a child, but the second, third, and fourth times it happened it didn't bother me so much. No, I'm really most interested in doing what I can to get my computer to run as fast and with as few complications as possible. You did remind me of one thing I hadn't thought of recently: noise. That's important. In fact, that's why I bought a Mac. After doing quite a bit of research, I had decided on buying the PC that was always wining popularity contests. I was just about to buy it, and even took a PC course at my college to get ready for it, when I realized that the Mac was meant for me because of its quiet operation (the PCs at school were just too noisy for me) and and its compactness. Of course, when I bought my printer, the compactness issue went out the window. Even so, I still think I made the right decision. I only regret replacing my desktop model with a laptop.

  • Since upgrading to Lion I can no longer mount my external hard drive

    I backed up about 10 minutes before installing Lion when I was on Snow Leopard. I know my drive works fine and there are no issues with it.
    However, when Lion was installed, I wanted to perform a Time Machine Backup, but it said my backup disk was unavailable. I checked in the Finder and it wasn't showing up in the side bar, even though it was connected to my Mac and the indicator light on the hard drive itself was flashing - suggesting drive activity. I can also hear the drive spinning.
    I opened Disk Utility and the external hard drive appears in the side bar and it says 'WD My Passport 071A Media'. Underneath that is the 'Time Machine Backups' drive which is greyed out. I have tried right clicking on it and choosing Mount but it won't mount, and I have also tried Repair Disk which doesn't finish, but also doesn't report any errors either. If I run Verify Disk and Repair Disk on the 'WD My Passport 071A Media' drive (which is the same drive) it does not report any problems and says the drive is working fine.
    I have tried updating the drive's firmware and using different ports but neither have worked. I have also tried rebooting my Mac.
    I really need to use this drive to backup and I can't format it because I can't afford to lose any data on there. Could someone please give me some advice or tell me how to fix this? I would appreciate it so much.
    Thanks,
    Nathan

    Nathan Miah wrote:
    Is there absolutely anything else I could do to sort this such as phone Apple Support
    If you want.
    or maybe install Snow Leopard using the disc it came on with my Mac and just set it up from a Time Machine Backup on my external hard drive (since it works under SL)?
    Did you install Lion on an empty partition, or did you upgrade Snow Leopard?  If you upgraded, I'd not recommend erasing it, since your backups are apparently gone.  It's doubtful Snow Leopard will recognize them. 
    It's not just backups on the drive either, there are other important things on there, so why won't they show?
    Mixing Time Machine backups and other data is not a good idea.  See #3 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.  It sounds like the whole disk is corrupted.
    I just really don't understand how this happened. Could it not be an issue with WD because they haven't issued firmware to support Lion yet?
    If this is a simple external HD, connected by USB or FireWire, no, unless you installed some of WD's software on it.  That shouldn't prevent it from being seen at all, but anything's possible.

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