Prevent External Firewire HD Spindown

I have two Maxtor OneTouch (1 - 500GB, 1 - 1TB) HDs connected via Firewire to an iMac (mid 2007) and after upgrading to Snow Leopard, the external HDs spin down almost immediately after being accessed.
I can click on the drive, wait for it to spinup, then browse for a folder; usually by the time I find the folder and click on it, I have to wait for the drive to spinup again.
This makes the drives and the system almost useless as every time I do something which looks at the attached drives (downloading, File -> Open on any program, opening finder, etc), I always have to wait for spinup and it's becoming very annoying.
I have unchecked the system preference "Put hard disks to sleep when possible", installed the dev tools to have access to SpindownHD and neither have fixed my problem.
Since I've had these disk on Leopard and didn't experience any spindown issues (except the drives internal firmware timeout spindown) so I can only attribute it to something in snow leopard.
Does anybody else see this happening? Any other ideas to try?
Thanks,
Justin

I am having the exact same issue. It started as soon as I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I have been searching the web for an solution to the problem, but I have only found a software program to prevent external disks from spinning down and a kludge listed on macosxhints not specific to snow leopard.. I have included the links, but I don't feel like I should have to spend $10 to fix something that worked in Leopard but not in Snow Leopard.
http://www.mosaicwebsite.com/macosx_software_development_for_leopard_tiger/nospin.asp
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090316190817357

Similar Messages

  • Preventing external HDs from spinning down

    Anyone know of a better way of preventing my OWC external FireWire HardDrive from spinning down (and hence slowing some/most? Finder operations down) than 'Spindown fix 1.1' (http://www.index-site.com/software.html)?
    TIA!

    Mark,
    I don't think this works on external drives, but you may want to check to see if your Mac's Disk Sleep Timer setting may have been changed. Disk Sleep Timer is one of your Mac's Power Management settings and can be found under the Power item in System Profiler. The default setting for Leopard is 180 minutes, but for Tiger it was only 10 minutes, which was quite annoying.
    You can change this setting by typing the following command in Terminal:
    sudo pmset disksleep ?
    Replace the ? with the number of minutes you want to set and press <Return>, then when prompted, type in your password. If you use a setting of 0 (zero), the hard disks will never sleep, unless you checked "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver Control Pane.
    Again, I don't know if this works with external drives, but it's worth a shot.
    Keith

  • Prevent external disk from spinning up

    I am not sure this is really related to time machine, but here goes.
    I have an external firewire disk attached, and it has one partition for time machine.
    When time machine starts a backup, it wakes the disk (i.e., spins it up), which is fine.
    A while after the backup, the disk spins down again, fine, too.
    However, in-between backups, the disk spins up for no apparent reason.
    This is a bit annoying, since i'm not using the disk at all (other than for backup), and it makes a bit of a noise, so i would like to keep the waking times of the disk to a minimum.
    Any ideas?
    Best regards,
    Gabriel.
    PS:
    Yes, I have configured spotlight to exclude that external disk from indexing.
    Message was edited by: GabrielZ

    Experiencing the same thing here.
    It's a repeat of:
    Wake-up -> TM Backup -> Stays spinning for 10 minutes -> spins down -> Starts spinning 5
    minutes later -> Stays spinning for 10 minutes -> spins down......
    TM currently takes backup on :45, then the drive starts spinning up around :00, :15, :30.
    I'm worried that the excessive spindown, spinup will wear out the HD.
    This did not occur in 10.5.1. Started after upgrading to 10.5.2.
    Since the FireWire HD for TM is the only FireWire HD I have, I can't confirm whether this is related to Time Machine or not.
    By the way, using USB will prevent spindown, though backup will take a bit longer.

  • External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder

    External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder.
    I have an 2008 Mac Pro 8 core 2.66hz, 10GB Mem, ATI HD4870 with 4 internal 1 TB Drives. I have 3 external HDDs (2 USB + 1 FW400). The 2 USB HDDs are for Time Machine and backups.
    The external FW HD is a 1TB bootable clone of my Internal 1 TB boot HDD.
    I have 2 problems ... somethimes when using finder or opening a folder, copying files, starting or quiting a program, I get the spinning beach ball that seems to hang the Mac.
    I power off the external FW HDD and everything starts to work. I get an error about the device going offline, I then power the FW HDD back on and all is good.
    It seems the external FW Drive tends to hang the system. It occurs pretty frequently.
    Any recommendations?
    The other issue is that when I use finder to go to a folder, I seem to have to wait for all these drive to spin up. You can hear them all start whirring.
    is there a way to remove that lag?

    If you recently moved to Snow Leopard you might look for new firmware for your external drive. I would also get DiskWarrior and run that on the external and consider programs like Drive Genius. You might also back it up and wipe it and restore the data. After that I'd consider looking at a new external.
    Sleeping drives that take time to spin up after waking....I'd like to learn how to stop that myself. Be sure the Energy Saver in System Preferences is set to not put drives to sleep when possible. Even then my drives will go to sleep and I have up to 6 external added at times and they take quite a while to all spin up. I've never found a way to prevent that.
    BTW...external USB drives on a MacPro? Really? Even for backup....

  • Finder hangs | external firewire hdd

    hi list!
    unfortunately my finder.app gets completely wasted very often, which is quite annoying. i think this has got sth to do with my external firewire enclosure (raidsonic icybox 351 usb2/fw combo, prolific chipset), which sometimes just stops working (eg. after hibernate). and only if i disconnect the drive or switch it off completely, finder (and all the other finder-like dialogs) reincarnates. i feel the problem came up more often after a firmware update (mac mini or smc), but i could be wrong. no probs with this drive with lin and win so far...
    how can i unmount it more safely?
    using umount /dev/my_ieee1394disc ?
    any ideas, suggestions, similar experiences?
    Mac mini Dual [email protected], 1GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

    If you recently moved to Snow Leopard you might look for new firmware for your external drive. I would also get DiskWarrior and run that on the external and consider programs like Drive Genius. You might also back it up and wipe it and restore the data. After that I'd consider looking at a new external.
    Sleeping drives that take time to spin up after waking....I'd like to learn how to stop that myself. Be sure the Energy Saver in System Preferences is set to not put drives to sleep when possible. Even then my drives will go to sleep and I have up to 6 external added at times and they take quite a while to all spin up. I've never found a way to prevent that.
    BTW...external USB drives on a MacPro? Really? Even for backup....

  • Should I be able to boot from external firewire disk?

    Yesterday, to prepare for upgrading to Leopard, I copied across my hard drive contents onto an external Firewire drive, by using drag & drop, folder by folder.
    I was hoping that this would let me (after a reboot) select the external drive as my Startup Disk in System Prefs, or allow me to choose it if I rebooted holding down the alt key. However the external drive doesn't show up in either case.
    Is there something else I need to do to allow booting via external Firewire? Is that even possible on my PB 1.5GHz (OSX 10.3.9)? Thanks.

    Close, but no cigar! Copying by drag n drop misses invisible files necessary for a boot volume. The way to do this is to use one of the cloning programs like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything needed to make the FW drive bootable. You can even specify to NOT copy all your files if you wish.
    I go to Versiontracker.com to get these programs.

  • Blue screen of death when La Cie external firewire drive connected

    I tested a LaCie external firewire drive on my iMac and it worked fine. I packed it up well and posted it to a friend who gets the blue screen of death when the LaCie is connected to her iMac. She's not even trying to boot from it.
    My iMac is 9.1  and hers is 8.1.  We are both running Snow Leopard.  Was there some problem once upon a time with chipsets or am I mis-remembering?
    TIA

    Create an ISO (Encore) or folder on your hard drive (Encore or Premiere Elements) and then use the FREE http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download to write files or folders or ISO to disc for DVD or BluRay (send the author a PayPal donation if you like his program)
    Imgburn will read the ACTUAL disc brand from the disc, which is not always the same as the box label (Memorex is notorious for buying "anything" and putting it inside a Memorex box)
    When you write to disc with Imgburn, use the SLOWEST possible speed setting, so your burner has the best chance to create "good, well formed" laser burn holes... since no player is required to read a burned disc, having a "good" one from a high quality blank will help

  • Can I Stop An External FireWire HD From Sleeping?

    I Have An External FireWire Hard Drive (Maxtor 75 GIG. Model # FWRA080LE001) And I Was Wondering If I Could Stop It From Going To Sleep? When It Does Go To Sleep, And I Click On It To Open It, It Doesn't Respond, And It Locks Up My Desktop, And I Have To Reboot It By Holding Down The Power Button.

    Found it out!

  • External Firewire Drive Ceases to be Detected After DVD Drive Installation

    About a week ago, I replaced the original Pioneer DVR-103 drive in my Quicksilver 800 Mhz/dual G4 with a Pioneer DVR-115 to work with newer, faster media. After restarting the machine, I got an alert that told me my 80Gb Maxtor external firewire drive wouldn't initialize. The only real option it gives me is to reformat, thus losing valuable data. That's a non-starter. I've tried restarting the machine with the new DVR unplugged, but I get the same result. I've zapped the Pram, thinking it was a dirty pram, but no go. I've reset the nvram to default, using the command line, but no luck. The odd thing is that applications (like iTunes) continue to access the music files stored on it. I need this drive. Seagate support has been worthless. Any ideas?

    About a week ago, I replaced the original Pioneer DVR-103 drive in my Quicksilver 800 Mhz/dual G4 with a Pioneer DVR-115 to work with newer, faster media. After restarting the machine, I got an alert that told me my 80Gb Maxtor external firewire drive wouldn't initialize. The only real option it gives me is to reformat, thus losing valuable data. That's a non-starter. I've tried restarting the machine with the new DVR unplugged, but I get the same result. I've zapped the Pram, thinking it was a dirty pram, but no go. I've reset the nvram to default, using the command line, but no luck. The odd thing is that applications (like iTunes) continue to access the music files stored on it. I need this drive. Seagate support has been worthless. Any ideas?

  • Disk Utility Unable to Repair External FireWire Hard Disk

    Hello all.
    This is the External FireWire Hard Disk that has been giving me problems for days, it is a Backup/Clone Disk of my sis's Mac mini Core Duo, and may explain why it was so hard and took so much pain to copy some of the data out, at times it failed to mount, and I manage to rescue some data after using Disk Warrior, but Disk Warrior was also unable to replace it with a new directory.
    Anyway, so I (was able to) mount the hard disk, and I was successful in erase and reformating it.
    But when I (try to) repair it with Disk Utility's First Aid, this report is what I get:
    (The usual 'Checking...' text lines, text in BOLD indicates RED colour text)
    Checking HFS Plus volume
    Checking Extents Overflow file
    Checking Catalog file
    Checking Catalog hierarchy
    Checking volume bitmap
    Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
    Checking volume information
    The volume Untitled could not be repaired after 3 attempts
    Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
    1 HFS volume checked
    1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
    Repair attempted on 1 volume
    1 volume could not be repaired
    Then a window dropped down from the top says:
    First Aid failed
    Disk Utility stopped repairing "Untitled" because the following error was encountered:
    The underlying task reported failure on exit
    (OK Button)
    I guess this hard disk is really a gone case?? I am quite OK just to replace it with a brand new one... maybe all the trouble I had in the beginning is because I may already have a faulty backup drive to begin with???
    Thanks and cheers

    Hi Kappy,
    I knew there was something about "not mixing" PPC and Intel versions of dealing with the external drive.
    The drive was originally prepared on an Intel Mac mini Core Duo. But it should also mount normally on a PPC mac as an external hard drive right?
    Here's the sequence of events:
    1. Tried to boot from the Back Up/Clone Drive of the Mac mini Core Duo, through my MacBook Core 2 Duo, but failed to boot up
    I had to shut down the MacBook (prolonged Bluescreen)
    2. When I reboot the MacBook, and tried to mount the ext drive as normal, nothing happens, I knew something was wrong
    3. Able to reach the vendor, use the Mac mini again to erase and reformat the drive, then check with DU, everything is OK
    Clone with SuperDuper
    After that check again with DU, not everything is alright, there are errors.
    4. Brought the drive home, try to mount on my iMac G5, nothing happens.
    I did a check on this forum, and the reply was that I should be able to use Disk Warrior 4 (Universal) on a PPC to fix an Intel-based ext drive. I was very specific and detail in my post/question
    5. So anyway, I have no other option, I ran Disk Warrior 4 from my PPC iMac G5 and scan the ext drive, trying to fix it.
    It reported the drive is too damaged to be replace with a new Directory, but gave me a Preview Mode. I use this to copy some data out.
    But not sure if the data is OK or not.
    6. After that, I was able to mount the drive in my iMac G5, so I just use DU and erase and reformat the drive, with Zero Data
    7. Ran DU again, and that's where I am now, at the very first post, getting error messages that I cannot fix the drive
    Thanks and cheers

  • Cannot Boot from OSX on external firewire drive

    I recently bought a seagate hardrive and installed it in an external firewire casing. I partitioned it into two partitions, and installed osx 10.4.10 on one of the partitions, the same as is running on my Ti Book.
    I tried selecting the os on the firewire drive as the startup disk, but when i restart, after the grey screen i get the flashing question mark icon, until the mac recognises only the default osx on the internal drive and boots with that instead.
    That not working, i created a clone of my startup disk using DejaVu in my system preferences and saved it on the other, empty partition on the external drive and tried booting from that.
    On restarting, i get the grey screen once again as the backlight fires up, and nothing more. the screen remains grey without any further ado until i hold the power button and force it to turn off. then as i start it up again, up comes the flashing question mark icon followed by a boot from the internal drive.
    Any Solutions on this?
    Many Thanks, Neptune.

    Hi Dale,
    Whoops- everythings not as smooth as i thought it was!
    since i restored my internal drive, a lot of things have been really messed up, starting with, for example, iTunes reverting to version 4 instead of 7. that wasnt a problem, i still had the 7 installer, and soon had my whole music library back again. but the computer appears to have a problem with the handling of graphics. the finder wont create previews of even simple jpeg images, nor will it for video. quicktime wont open any video file, i get some random error message which i cant remember stating it could not open the file. and if i view my finder window in grid icon view, the usual blue mac os desktop image that i keep as a background in the finder window isnt there, instead its pitch black. same goes for the slideshow feature in the application graphic converter, i can start a slideshow and it will scroll through the images, but every image will instead be completely black. there are no scroll bars in itunes. i can scroll down randomly by clicking where the scroll bar should be, but there is nothing visual there at all, no scroll bar, no arrows. when i connect my ipod, the main ipod window of itunes wont display any graphics either, be it the picture of the ipod or the capacity bar indicating usage of the drive for music, videos, data, etc. instead, fine print says something similar to 'cannot display image, quicktime and lzw tiff decompression plugin (?) required' I cant remember word for word what it says, dont quote me on that.
    the computer also came to a dead freeze twice in ten minutes, i had to hold the power button down to get it to shut off.
    im sure there are other issues too which i havent yet noticed, but even these, i havent the faintest clue what could be causing them!
    do you?

  • Is it possible to detach an external firewire BOOT disk during sleep?

    Hi,
    I have an aging PowerBook G4 17 inch (3 years and 3 months) which is still good and fast enough for my needs. Last year the display and motherboard were changed which cost me some money so I would like to hold on to it for one or two more years. Yesterday I suddenly heard a strange noise coming from the hard disk and the Finder and Disk Utility ran extremely slow afterwards for some time. I shut it down, waited a couple of hours and now everything seems to be normal. I take it the hard disk might soon die (Toshiba make, more than 3 years old, a lot of graphics work requiring disk activity). Or 1° I replace the internal hard disk or 2) I buy an external firewire disk to boot from (which I can continue using afterwards if the laptop goes dead). I am leaning towards the second solution. However I would like to know:
    1. Is it good behavior to put the computer to sleep, detach the hard disk (from which I booted) and attach it before waking it again? This would make it easy to transport it. I did a test and it seems to work however one test might not be conclusive...
    2. Would my system be as fast as with an internal one (assuming I buy an external FireWire 800)?
    Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
    Thanks!
    PS: what is the average life of a PowerBook? The sales guy from a local Apple shop told me that after 4 years any Mac is good for the trash.

    The sleep removal will work as long as the battery doesn't go flat but is not really good practice to remove a boot disk after startup.
    Speed would be reasonable but internal would be better, replacing the internal drives on AlBooks is a bit fiddly but it can be done, see here for a guide.
    The guy in the shop was trying to sell you a new Mac, there are people out there still using 10+ year old Macs!

  • Booting Windows on Intel Mac from an external Firewire/USB hard disk?

    Is it possible to boot an Intel iMac from an external hard disk - in target disk mode etc., without having to install Boot Camp?
    I have a spare drive with installed XP on it and I need to find out what is on the drive before re-formatting. However, I only have my mac in which to do so. The extra disk will be used in an external firewire/USB 2.0 caddy. I have researched some methods, but they are all very long winded and require a PC or the creation of a Windows partition on my start-up disk using Boot Camp.

    "Is it possible to boot an Intel iMac from an external hard disk - in target disk mode etc., without having to install Boot Camp?"
    No.

  • Can PB boot from an External Firewire Hard Drive?

    Can I set up an external firewire hard drive as an emergency boot drive, in case my internal drive goes south? Anyone have utility software recommendations for setting up boot drive or mirror drive, in addition to OS X's Disk Utility? Thanks.

    Photon2:
    Yes, you can set up your external firewire HDD as an emergency boot drive.
    Here's what you need to do:
    1. Your HDD must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
    2. (Optional) I suggest you partition your HDD so that the first partition is roughly equivalent to the size of your internal HDD. The rest can be partitioned for other uses. (See Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery) For step-by-step for formatting and partitioning please post back).
    3. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal HDD to the external firewire HDD/partition.
    Please post back with further questions or comments.
    Cheers
    cornelius

  • Is it possible to boot a G4 (pci graphics) from an external firewire drive?

    I have a Lacie 250 gig bootable external firewire drive which is recognized on my Power PC G4 400 but I cannot get it to boot from this drive. The procedure works fine on my ibook... I looked into a possible firmware update but the apple site says no update is necessary for the G4 400/pci graphics...
    Any suggestions?

    There sure are some radically contradictory posts here! (This isn't typical, at least in this section of the Discussions, RMx2.)
    Can anyone who has posted here (or might join in here) actually boot from a hard drive connected via USB? I just tested this with OS X and I can't. For some time now, the Discussions have been riddled with posts, whether 100% accurate or inaccurate, that Macs don't boot from USB drives, despite the seemingly conflicting info in the article that Don kindly referenced. (John Huber: Don't eat your words just yet, John!)
    Here's my personal experience, for what it's worth... I have a rev.2 B&W G3 which recognizes, reads, and writes to drives via USB, but refuses to boot from them (I tested with OS X 10.3 and 10.4). I also have a QS 2002 G4 that yields the same results. The QS G4 will, however, boot from these drives via FW. I used a WiebeTech ComboDock for testing this with both USB and FW. I tested with two different hard drives, both of which are known to have stable, working versions of OS X on them.
    My G3 running OS X 10.3.9 sees the USB-connected drives in the Startup Disk Preference Pane, but when I click to Restart after selecting the USB system folder there, I get a beachball (haven't seen that in awhile...) and have to Force Quit System Preferences. Console tells me that that it could not get open firmware information or set open firmware information, and that it can't touch or set System/Library/CoreServices/BootX, returning Error 1 running bless.
    On the QS running Tiger, the USB OSs don't even appear in the Startup Disk Pane of Sys Prefs. I can see the USB drive(s) using the Startup Manager, but selecting them and restarting results in a hung startup to a spinning cog with a prohibitory sign on the screen...
    I haven't tried playing around with open firmware NVRAM settings (and don't intend to, except perhaps for trying an NVRAM reset), nor have I attempted to boot to OS 9, reset the startup disk there, and attempt the boot again to the USB device in OS X and in OS 9, which I may try later on when I have a bit of time...
    Gary
    Message was edited by: Majordadusma

Maybe you are looking for