See what's spinning my hard drives up?

Benjamindaines

macrumors 68030

Original poster

• Feb 7, 2007

• #1

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

macrumors 65816

• Feb 8, 2007

• #2

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

 

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5

• Feb 8, 2007

• #3

Benjamindaines said:

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.

Click to expand...

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.

 

D

dukeman

macrumors member

• Feb 8, 2007

• #4

wrldwzrd89 said:

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.

Click to expand...

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

macrumors 68030

Original poster

• Feb 8, 2007

• #5

wrldwzrd89 said:

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.

Click to expand...

That's because of this:

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