Stop External HD from Spinning Down?

Is it possible to stop an external HD from spinning down when connected to a MBPro? It seems that the setting in the energy saver control panel have no effect on external drives. I'm using my laptop (MBPro 2.33Ghz) for music production and don't want my external drive to spin down while I'm working.
Is there any way to keep it spinning?

This may be a "feature" built into the firmware of your external drive. If so it will not be affected by your Energy Saver settings. I recently had to advise someone with a "Western Digital MyBook" spinning down to ask the manufacturer for help, but the outcome was that the only solution was the purchase of an uncrippled drive. Being in the firmware, the "feature" could not be erased or altered.
"Is it possible to stop…"
Yes, but only in what I would consider an unacceptable manner, e.g. by having a small script that constantly accesses the drive, but I would suggest that a) it should not be needed, and b) it would be highly likely to interfere with other things you were doing.
So, as a start, you should a) read any docs that came with that drive, and b) go to the relevant site and see what you can find out.
I hope that none of this applies to you, but I just thought you ought to be aware of the possibility.

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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

Can I Keep My External HD from Spinning Down?

I've got an external HD connected to my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. But I'm always getting spinning beach balls as I wait for the external drive to spin up and become available.
Is there any way for me to keep that drive always spinning?
The Energy Saver setting "Put the hard Disk(s) to sleep when possible" is already unchecked.
Thanks for any help.
-=-Joe

Here is a discussion on the subject from a dubious source...
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=493300
In a Discussion on CHUD tools...
I have a NewerTech miniStack connected to my eMac, and I follow one of the oldest mantras in computing: "Save early. Save often." That means saving every few minutes, but sometimes OS X puts your external drive to sleep sooner than you'd like, and that means that you have to wait for the drive to spin up to speed before your file can be saved.
From a source I never use but I believe you have linked here once or twice:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
"To conserve energy, modern hard disk drives are designed to spin-down after a certain period of inactivity. This is usually referred to as "hard drive sleep" but the technical term is Standby mode.
In Standby mode, the hard drive is in a state of low energy consumption and its platters have ceased to spin. It is awaiting a read or write instruction, at which time the hard drive will spin-up its platters — wake up and enter Active mode — to perform the read or write operation. It can require up to 30-35 seconds for a hard drive to spin up once in Standby mode."
Also here...
http://www.szilveszter.ca/news/prevent-hard-disk-drive-spindown-on-mac-os-x/
I believe I could do a fuller search but I did do due diligence for 'ya
-mj

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

AEBS prevents my USB drive from spinning down

Hi all,
I thought I would share my concerns about connecting USB external drive with AirPort Extreme. I've seen several post here talking about that issue, but they didn't solve my problem.
Otherwise great product, AirPort Extreme n prevents my WD MyBook 500GB disk from spinning down when not in use. I bought that particular disc, because of its ability to go to sleep when not accessed for a period of time. It works great when connected to my MacBook via FW400 or USB 2.0, but when I use it via AiPort Disk utility and connect to AEBS the disk will not spin down, keep running and getting hot. I am concerned with that fact, because it consumes more energy and will shorten disc life (yes, it is not a server graded disc, as most of USB ones, and it was not designed to spin continously).
I read some posts about Spotlight indexing the drive, but that is not true because of three facts:
- when connected via USB 2.0 or FW400 the disc spins down.
- when I left it for two hours it was still spinning - Spotlight should have finished indexing by then right?
- even if I eject network drives from the Desktop, breaking the connection with my MB it is still spinning.
There seems to be a problem with AE itself. AEBS seem to keep the disc busy all the time or the disc thinks that's the situation.
From what I've read this is not MyBook only case. People with Lacie, Maxtor and other brands are having the same problem.
At this point I have no solution to this. I disconnected the drive and access it via FW400 only. That's a shame, because Apple advertises AirPort Extreme using USB drive connectivity as a major selling point. I think that situation is unacceptable. A disc spinning 24/7 is asking for trouble.
If someone has a solution to that problem, please share it with the forum readers, if not we will have to wait for Apple to fix this. I hope someone from Apple is reading this.
MacBook C2D Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Otherwise great product, AirPort Extreme n prevents
my WD MyBook 500GB disk from spinning down when not
in use. I bought that particular disc, because of its
ability to go to sleep when not accessed for a period
of time.
Other posts indicate you can solve this by privatizing the drive in Spotlight's preferences. I haven't tried this because I like the drive indexed--it is a shared data drive after all.
I turn the drive off manually when I'm not using it. Unfortunately, the Airport doesn't recognize the drive (or printers that I've turned off, for that matter) when I turn it back on. The only solution I've found is to restart the Airport. Any ideas on this problem?

Can stop the Bottomline from scrolling down or up when I moved it manually down.

Can stop the Bottomline from scrolling down or up when I moved it manually down. It kept on scrolling until i forced a program quit.

I Use a Mac Pro 2x28 Quad OS 10.9.3 and A Wacom Intous3 Driver 6.3.7-3
Thank you for the fast replay.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Michael Stubbs
PROEXPOCONSULT
Idstein, Germany
Am 23.05.2014 um 22:49 schrieb Zak Williamson (Adobe) <[email protected]>:
Can stop the Bottomline from scrolling down or up when I moved it manually down.
created by Zak Williamson (Adobe) in Adobe Muse Bugs - View the full discussion
Mac or Windows? What input device? If it's a Wacom tablet, do you have the latest version of the driver?
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Hey, constantly since I installed the iOS 7.1 upgrade, my iPhone has been constantly shutting down and I think it's really frustrating and I whant to know how I can stop my iPhone from shutting down so I can downgrade to iOS 7.0.4?

Hey, constantly since I installed the iOS 7.1 upgrade, my iPhone has been constantly shutting down and I think it's really frustrating and I whant to know how I can stop my iPhone from shutting down so I can downgrade to iOS 7.0.4?

7.1.1 is certainly compatible with the iPhone 4. Just try a reset first.
Close all open apps by double-tapping the home button, then swiping up and off the screen with the app window (not the smaller icon).
Reset your device: hold down the home button along with the sleep/wake button until the screen goes black and you see the Apple, then let go. (No data loss)

How do I stop the toolbar from dropping down when I load a program?

How do I stop the toolbar from dropping down when I load a program? When I close a program Like world or Warcraft for example the toolbar keeps opening up when the World of Warcraft manager reopens How do I stop this for this and other programs
I use, its really annoying and should be fixed or a setting made to stop it from doing this entirely.
KingOfMyPC58

Hi,
Could you please share a screenshot here with us for better understanding this issue.
Regarding to “other programs”, what are these programs, more detailed information would be very helpful.
Regards,
Yolanda
Yolanda
TechNet Community Support

Need external HDs to spin down

Hi to everybody, I apologize if this ain't the right setionfor my topic as it is highy related to hardware and just a little to SL.
This is my problem: I took a couple of WD 500 Gbyte and placed them in a single box each. I the did a software RAID0 within Disk Utility.
Both disk are stil working fast but do NEVER spin down even if my iMac is shut down.
I found several utilities to prevent HDs from spinning down but non for forcing them to spin down after a certain idle time. I also set 5 minutes of idle time to spin down with Xcode's utility HDSpindown but nothing changes.
Any help?
TIA
Simon

Just out of curiosity, can you tell me the utilities that keep disks from spinning down? I have a drive in my Pro that's spinning down and it's driving me crazy. I've contacted the manufacturers and Seagate has no solutions and WDC suggested I buy a PC. You know what I told them.
Thanks

Stop external HD randomly spinning up and down

Hi,
I have just bought and installed a LaCie P'9230 2TB external HD to use as my Time Machine disk. I was previously running Time Machine just once a day to an iOmega disk, which I would switch on only when I wanted to run the backup. With the new LaCie, I thought I would leave it on all the time and use Time Machine Editor to program Time Machine to run twice a day.
The LaCie works fine, and Time Machine runs twice a day as scheduled. However, the LaCie will go into "Eco mode" after a few minutes of inactivity, and then go to sleep. This is fine – I would be quite happy for it to go to sleep and stay asleep until Time Machine wakes it up twice a day. The problem is that something seems to be waking it up every 15 minutes or so, causing the disk to spin up. It then goes back to sleep again after a few minutes, and the cycle continues. Note that this happens even if I'm not actually doing anything on the machine at the time – in other words, it's not caused by me opening or saving files, running searches, etc.
I know that constant spinning up and down is a major cause of early HD failure, so I'd like to find a way around this. Ideally, I'd like to find a way of letting the disk stay asleep until Time Machine wakes it; failing that, I'd prefer it to stay awake all the time and not go to sleep at all. I've tried unchecking the option in Energy Saver to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible", but this seems to make no difference – presumably because the Eco mode/sleep function is baked into the LaCie firmware and cannot be overridden by the OS.
I've spent ages trawling the interwebs; I've found is that this seems to be a common complaint, but haven't found any definitive answers. Really hoping someone on here might have some insight and/or suggestions.
Thanks,
Rob

This may be a "feature" built into the firmware of your external drive. If so it will not be affected by your Energy Saver settings. I recently had to advise someone with a "Western Digital MyBook" spinning down to ask the manufacturer for help, but the outcome was that the only solution was the purchase of an uncrippled drive. Being in the firmware, the "feature" could not be erased or altered.
"Is it possible to stop…"
Yes, but only in what I would consider an unacceptable manner, e.g. by having a small script that constantly accesses the drive, but I would suggest that a) it should not be needed, and b) it would be highly likely to interfere with other things you were doing.
So, as a start, you should a) read any docs that came with that drive, and b) go to the relevant site and see what you can find out.
I hope that none of this applies to you, but I just thought you ought to be aware of the possibility.

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 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!

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.

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.

I tried to download picture/video files from iPhone 5S to MacBook Pro but it won't stop importing and I don't have phone connected. I need to shut down the computer and I can't stop the import from spinning

I tried to import picture/video files from iPhone 5S to MacBook Pro Aperature. It appeared to be trying to download every picture I have ever taken even tho I checked do not import duplicates. The phone is not connected to lap top. It has been spinning for 1/2 day. I can't stop it. I can't shut down the computer. How do I stop the import and shut computer down.

Hey L. DENISE,
I recommend that you use the following article to help you address this issue:
OS X: How to quit an unresponsive application using Force Quit
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3411
Thanks for being a part of the Apple Support Communities!
Regards,
Braden

Stop External HD from Spinning Down?

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