I've noticed this for a while, but my friend came up with a quick, easy fix. The Tuxera NTFS driver that most people use to access their NTFS drives in OS X seems to constantly be doing something in the background, even when not you're not accessing your NTFS drives. This consumes a surprising amount of power, and therefore battery life. I haven't been able to figure out a way to stop it from doing whatever it's doing, but my friend came up with a simple workaround: unmount your NTFS drives. Most people aren't constantly accessing their NTFS drives in OS X anyway, so not having access to them shouldn't really be an issue. Plus, you can always remount them if you need; it takes less than 5 seconds.
To unmount your NTFS partitions, just open Disk Utility, highlight your NTFS partitions, then hit the blue Unmount button at the top.
My friend took this a step further and wrote a script that automatically ejects your NTFS partitions on startup. Doing that is a few more steps, but it's not hard:
To unmount your NTFS partitions, just open Disk Utility, highlight your NTFS partitions, then hit the blue Unmount button at the top.
My friend took this a step further and wrote a script that automatically ejects your NTFS partitions on startup. Doing that is a few more steps, but it's not hard:
- Open Terminal, type "df" (no quotes), then hit enter.
- A list of your partitions will come up. On the far right, you'll see the names of your partitions. On the far left, you'll see their locations. Write down the locations of all your NTFS drives. For example, mine are on /dev/disk0s3 and /dev/disk1s3.
- Open Automator and make a new Application. Add a Run Shell Script action. The Shell should be /bin/bash and switch Pass Input to "as arguments". Delete the "cat" that's already in the box and add the following "hdiutil unmount /dev/diskXsX" (no quotes), where the X's correspond to the locations of your NTFS partitions. If you have more than one NTFS partition, put each on it's own line. Mine looks like this:
Code:
hdiutil unmount /dev/disk1s3 hdiutil unmount /dev/disk0s3 - Save your new Automator application anywhere you want, and call it anything you want.
- Go to System Preferences -> Accounts. Select your account, then click Login Items. Hit the plus sign at the bottom and add your new application.
- Restart your computer to make sure it worked! You should see your NTFS partitions appear on the desktop, then immediately unmount.