See what's spinning my hard drives up?

[Benjamindaines]

Is there any way to see what app is making my external hard drives spin up? (they are FireWire)? I am not doing anything that would make them spin up but yet they at seemingly random times.

[CubeHacker]

It might be spotlight searching through the disks in the background.

[wrldwzrd89]

Is there any way to see what app is making my external hard drives spin up? (they are FireWire)? I am not doing anything that would make them spin up but yet they at seemingly random times.
Mac OS X Mail does this to my external drives every time I open the preferences dialog. No idea why. Several other apps I use do this - usually only when they load a directory listing.

[dukeman]

Mac OS X Mail does this to my external drives every time I open the preferences dialog. No idea why. Several other apps I use do this - usually only when they load a directory listing.

Probably caused by spotlight. Mail uses spotlight for its search function. Spotlight indexes all of your drives, (causes them to spin up). Drag the external hard drive to privacy section of the spotlight pref. Also do a Google search to turnoff indexing perm if you'd like.

[Benjamindaines]

Mac OS X Mail does this to my external drives every time I open the preferences dialog. No idea why. Several other apps I use do this - usually only when they load a directory listing.

That's because of this:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/902/picture1oa1.jpg

It looks on your system for other apps that can be set as default.