Disk spin-up on login - am I alone?

[spidey3]

In brief: Lion won't let me log in until ALL attached disks are spun up.

Is Lion different in this regard? In Snow Leopard, I don't remember spinning beachball waiting for external disks to spin up at login time. Some start-on-login apps might wait a bit for the disks, but there was no hang in the login screen waiting for the disks.

I wouldn't mind this so much if I understood what Lion was doing here. What data is it loading from my Time Machine and Video Vault storage disks at login?

I think this may be a bit more noticeable for me, because of my two RAID enclosures; one takes about 20 seconds to spin its 4 disks up in sequence, the other another 10 seconds for its 2 disks...

Spidey!!!

 

[satcomer]

No you are not alone! I have noticed this too.

 

[spidey3]

Some analysis:

• One culprit is Finder - which is not only looking for the list of drives connected, but also trying to open a file called ".hidden" in the root directory of each drive. It appears likely that Finder is blocking on this, and login cannot proceed until it has discovered the non-existance of these files. Does anyone know what ".hidden" does, why Finder is looking for it, and whether it is possible to suppress this behavior?
• "loginwindow" is doing a lot! It seems to be scanning .TemporaryItems and .Trashes folders on every disk at the moment of login. I understand .Trashes [a bit] - but why would there be .TemporaryItems on EVERY disk?
• fseventsd starts accessing files in "/.fseventsd" on each disk when I log in. I don't think this is really a problem - it is the filesystem events daemon, and presumably would have nothing to do if the disk had not been spun up for other reasons. On the other hand I do notice that it occasionally opens up files on my Time Machine disk even when backup is not running...
• Finally, I see mds [Spotlight indexer] accessing this disk -- but this is not until later, and I do think it is the blocker.

Has anyone explored this further?

Spidey!!!

 

[Mightee]

I've noticed this too, but I have no idea what the problem is.