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How to stop secondary HDD from waking up?

fenjen

fenjen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 9, 2012
352
24
Hi guys,

Some time ago I've added a SSD to my Macbook, whilst moving the normal hard drive to where my cd drive was before (using a caddy/optibay).
The SSD (of course) is my main hard drive for booting OSX (and windows) and is used for programs/files I use frequently.
The old HDD is used for general storage, and is therefor not accessed often. As such, I'd like to have it dormant when not using it, as it preserves battery and is also quite less noisy.
To achieve this I've set the HDD sleep timer to 1 minute, and have turned of the HDD related options in iStat Menus.
However, my hard drive still spins up every few minutes or so, even though I'm never using it myself.
Even when I unmount the HDD through a terminal command, the hard drive will keep spinning up.

Is there any way to keep the HDD in sleep, until I actually navigate to it in finder? I don't mind having to unmount/mount the drive, as long as it actually stops my mac from accessing it.
 
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Some have suggested iStat being the culprit or spotlight, but I've disabled both drives in spotlight (trough the settings menu) and I've disabled all harddrive related things in iStat, but still it's doing it. Anyone any ideas?
 
It sounds like the enclosure is polling the OS to check the drive....I guess you could try a different one...I have an Innatech that works but it's hit and miss. I leave my iMac on " never sleep" as it has my R4 with all our movies etc. on it so it runs 24/7. I've grown used to the noise. If I'm recording I just eject the Pegasus and shut it down.
 
Macman45 said:
It sounds like the enclosure is polling the OS to check the drive....I guess you could try a different one...I have an Innatech that works but it's hit and miss. I leave my iMac on " never sleep" as it has my R4 with all our movies etc. on it so it runs 24/7. I've grown used to the noise. If I'm recording I just eject the Pegasus and shut it down.
Click to expand...

Are the enclosures really different? I thought they were just basically a socket with an extension cord (not really but you get the idea). I use the one from HDDCaddy which seems pretty okay afaik.

It's not really That much of a problem I guess.. but it's just annoying to hear it spin up from time to time when it could just as well be silent.
 
Optibay/HDDCaddy and hard drive spin up

Somehow I've got the feeling it's spinning up even more lately and I can't find anything conclusive, anywhere I've searched. So does anyone have a solution?
 
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simsaladimbamba said:
What Terminal command did you use? And when unmounted, is the HDD not visible in Finder and greyed out in Disk Utility?

Have you tried Semulov yet?
Click to expand...

hdiutil eject disk1
And I've just tried it, but it didn't actually do anything. It has lead me, however to an app called mountain, which is very similar (difference being that it does work on my Macbook, lol). I'm not sure if it will actually stop the spin up, but I'll try it and report.
 
Bruno09 said:
A few months ago, I made this for a friend who was having the very same issue.

It worked fine for him.

This is a small AppleScript application that uses the same Terminal command.

Place the app in the Dock and use it to eject/mount the HD.

http://demo.ovh.eu/fr/4acaf9365c932a860dfe826d5c3342d5/
Click to expand...

I actually made the same thing. I had made an app trough automator to just automate the terminal command. It didn't, however, stop the spin up permanently. It may be slightly less often, but every now and then (mostly every couple of minutes) it will just spin up again for no apparent reason.

I've also tried the app Mountain, and while it is a lot more convenient than the script, the hard drive will still spin up. I really don't get why. The drive is basically invisible for the system and all my apps and yet it still get spun up all the time. Sometimes it will even stay on for longer than a minute, meaning it either gets accessed continuously, or more than 1 time a minute.
 
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Bruno09 said:
When you click the "Eject" button, the disk does not stop spinning ??
Click to expand...

Well initially it will stop spinning when I press the eject button. The problem is that it will start spinning again from time to time even when it is ejected.
 
Is there maybe a way to monitor HDD usage to see what is trying to access my hard drive?
 
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