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External hard drives spin up for no reason

To add onto an old thread, yep mine's exactly the same.
Bring up Safari, it beach balls until the drives spin up.
2 external USB2 drives connected, different manufactorers.

Annoying to say the least...
 
Just an FYI to all

So far so good it seems as if the drives are being searched by Spotlight at random. Check sys pref.....spotlight....privacy and make sure there are not any files or folders found on your external drive selected.
 
It's been driving me nuts too, and I've been trying to get to the bottom of it. Definitely Spotlight -related, and they spin-up every 15-minutes, like clockwork. The thing of it is, both my external HD's are excluded from Spotlight searching, so I still have no idea how to make it stop.

Let's hope for a 10.5.3 fix!!!
 
Oh well, the spotlight preference pane didn't work out the issue. I really hope Apple fixes this soon. Its driving me out of my mind :mad::mad:
 
I'm sorry I can't remember the exact details because it was more than a month ago when I did this, but keep an eye on your Activity Monitor when the HD's start spinning. Like I said, it is every 15:00 minutes. Some normally-inactive process suddenly gets really busy, just for a second as the drives spin-up. I Googled the process and it apparently is Spotlight related. :apple:
 
Interesting. I rarely can tell if my drive (WD 500 GP) is spinning up or not (maybe my hearing :rolleyes:). I can hear it activate, click at odd times when TM isn't backing up. Thanks for the Spotlight suggestion. I'm having other issues (the drive hangs up "preparing"), and maybe, hopefully, they are related.

It's not related. TM is going round and round and will so indefinitely until I turn off the drive. Sorry for the off-topic note.
 
same here, seems to do it every half our or so

it'll spin down because its not in use and then for no reason spin back up again later on

TM is on, but of course only backs up every hour so every other spin up is due to some unknown reason. happily though, the crummy 30-40mm fan in the back of my freecom 400gb NDAS drive is so loud it makes no difference if the disks spinning or not. im sure i could disable that fan, its utterly useless.
 
I hope this is something Apple is looking into. I find it to be a big annoyance since I keep my drive on all the time now with TimeMachine.
 
Some progress

I have a LaCie Triple that is doing the spin-up dance. Today, I quit all my normal apps (QuickSilver, iTunes, Mail.app, Firefox, Adium and WeatherDoc) and the spinups stopped. So far I have turned Adium and WeatherDoc back on, no problem. So it is most likely Quicksilver, iTunes, mail.app, or Firefox. Note that my iTunes music is on the external, but this problem started before I moved it there. Anyone else on this thread running QuickSilver?
 
otaku2 said:
I have a LaCie Triple that is doing the spin-up dance. Today, I quit all my normal apps (QuickSilver, iTunes, Mail.app, Firefox, Adium and WeatherDoc) and the spinups stopped. So far I have turned Adium and WeatherDoc back on, no problem. So it is most likely Quicksilver, iTunes, mail.app, or Firefox. Note that my iTunes music is on the external, but this problem started before I moved it there. Anyone else on this thread running QuickSilver?
Click to expand...

Mine does this and I don't use Quicksilver. I do have Mail.app always running though.
 
I *think* I found a cure

I found this shell command to shut down the Spotlight indexer and it seems to have quieted the drive:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

(Obviously, type it all on one line and you need your admin password to run it).

So far, no spin-ups (and no Spotlight searches, oh well).

And before you ask, yes, I have excluded the drive from Spotlight, but it seems like Spotlight still wants to write a record saying that the drive has not been indexed or some such.
 
same annoyance here. LaCie Triple interface using FW800.

I went to Spotlight –> Privacy and added the entire external drive for Spotlight to NOT search and it immediately stopped cranking away. Peace at last. But what will I do when I need to search the dang drive?
 
No joy

I tried that (again) and the drive still spins up by itself.
I have submitted a bug report to Apple, and after a lot of investigation they told me that my report was a duplicate, so maybe they are working on it.
 
For Mail, if you are using IMAP, a copy is kept on your hard-drive. A common trend I'm seeing is that a lot of people are running Mail.app, so might it that you have a large inbox in your Mail folder? That is on your spinning drive. A bit far-fetched but all i can think of at the moment...
 
SOLVED!!! Snapz X Pro was the culprit on my iMac! It started when I rebooted and although the processor load was tiny, my external HD's haven't spun-up since I nuked it. Thanks to whoever made similar comments on Macupdate.com. :apple:
 
I just got the new Seagate Free Agent for Mac and it is spinning up roughly every 10 minutes. I've tried adding it to Spotlights privacy list so will see if that stops it.
 
Sorry for bringing 'old' topic up, but i bought WD external hd and have the same issue. So does anyone have any light on this issue?

I use Time Machine and have made an bootable backup.
And yes i have added them to the Privacy tab.


EDIT: Found some info here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/587096/
But is it ok to do the sudo command on the drive/partition you use for Time Machine? Will it prevent it from working the way it should?
 
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