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External hard drives and freezing

M

mazstar1980

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 4, 2010
31
0
I tried searching for my particular problem but had no luck.

I have 2 external hard drives - one for Time Machine and another for storing media files.

If I'm browsing the internet for say a few mins and then I want to save or open a file the computer freezes and then it takes about 30 seconds when the two external drives start up - only problem is I'm not accessing the external drives.

I save my word documents on internal drive so I'm not sure why there is a 3- second freeze to start external drives - surely it should go straight to the internal drive?

Another Lion experience!
 
baryon

baryon

macrumors 68040
Oct 3, 2009
3,878
2,929
This is a known thing in OS X and was present in Leopard and Snow Leopard as well. The way the Finder works is that it needs all connected drives to be spun up and functional before even doing anything, which is why you can't save a file even on the internal until the externals have spun up. Very annoying but this is not a bug, it's the way OS X works.
 
M

mazstar1980

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 4, 2010
31
0
baryon said:
This is a known thing in OS X and was present in Leopard and Snow Leopard as well. The way the Finder works is that it needs all connected drives to be spun up and functional before even doing anything, which is why you can't save a file even on the internal until the externals have spun up. Very annoying but this is not a bug, it's the way OS X works.
Click to expand...

Thanks - doesn't sound like a very logical or efficient - very annoying feature of OSX.
 
G

generatech

macrumors newbie
Oct 28, 2010
2
0
Indeed, it's annoying

I'm not a fan of declaring deficiencies as features, except in the case of artists and musicians. Granted, Microsoft made a fortune with such "features."

The delay is totally annoying and Apple could easily fix it, ur, I mean, change it. There is no good reason for OSX to delay everything while external drives power up. Even while in the middle of web browsing, the delay will cause the entire system to freeze for 10-30 seconds.

Though very much like a Microsoft problem, Windows lacks this "feature."

NOTE: even with the OSX "Energy Saver" system preference "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" UNchecked, the delay still occurs.

I guess Lion doesn't have this problem, but I can't upgrade from OSX 10.6.8 until ProTools and other programs I use release Lion-compatible versions.
 
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