How to reduce time to recognize external hard drive?

[alexworden]

Hi,

I have a 500GB Western Digital MyBook external hard drive. Whenever I plug it into my MBP it takes up to 2 minutes to show up in the "Devices" list. It's clearly doing something but what? Is there any way I can speed up whatever it's doing so it is just recognize immediately?

Oh.. and it's formatted using FAT32 since it needs to be compatible with other systems.

Thanks,

Alex

 

[ebel3003]

Perhaps you should run verify (and possible repair) disk from disk utility to make sure that the system isn't struggling with a filesystem issue. My 2 firewire 500GB WD's both mount in about 30 seconds.

 

[alexworden]

Repair and verify

Hi,

I did the Repair and verify. I don't think it helped much. I timed it so I can give you some accurate facts. It takes 45 seconds to recognize the drive. This might me marginally faster now I did the repair, but it's still horribly slow.

Does anyone know what the drive is doing when it's booting up? Is there anything I can do to speed this up?

Thanks,

Alex