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bozz2006

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Aug 24, 2007
2,530
0
Minnesota
Has anyone else been experiencing this? Since upgrading to Lion, my HDD (which contains only my media, NOT my user library) keeps spinning itself up for no reason. Even now, I'm sitting at my desk with my computer open, reading, but not even using the computer at all, and my HDD keeps spinning up. Can't figure out why...
 
Mine does the same thing. I don't recall if it happened in Snow Leopard also or not.
 
Yeah, I actually posted in that thread. I was able to set sleep times before to fix the issue.

For me, it wasn't happening until I installed Lion. I can't figure out what is causing it now since it wasn't happening before. I'm wondering if Lion "broke" my sleep time command.

Edit:
I did a "pmset -g disk" in Terminal and found that disksleep had been reset to 10 minutes. I ran "sudo pmset -a spindown 1" to reset it to back sleep the disk after one minute of non-use, as I had done in SL. I'll report back on if this returns the computer to the previous behavior.
 
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I fixed my problem by using the program Cocktail and setting it so it puts the HDD to sleep after 1 minute.

http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've already run the Terminal command to set the disks to sleep at 1 one minute. The UI in Cocktail confirms that they are set to sleep at one minut and they still spin up for no apparent reason.
 
I guess I am suffering from a similar fate. I have tried everything I can think of (disabling Spotlight, making sure the disksleep value is correct) and still come up short.

I had a sneaking suspicion that it may be linked to Virtual Memory and writing Page ins but that seems to have gone to a dead-end and seems highly unlikely anyway.

Does anyone know of any monitoring program which would log/show what is trying to access/write to the optibay HDD?

Edit: OK, I did some research and have been looking over fs_usage in terminal. It seems as though the access is related to Mobile Backup and Spotlight (even though I disabled it).

I couldn't rule out some sort of paging access though: It accessed the Optibay HDD when I closed the log.

Edit 2: Definitely seems to be Spotlight and Time Machines Local/Mobile Backups which are firing up the disk. Not really sure what to do about Spotlight since I've got it to not index the drive.
 
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Another weird thing is that the three finger define tap also turns on my optibay HDD which I find EXTREMELY odd. Anyway, SL had moments too where it would spin up my drive for no reason and I was just fed up with messing around in terminal. In the end, use the shell script command that allows you to eject and mount your optibay with ease.
 
Another weird thing is that the three finger define tap also turns on my optibay HDD which I find EXTREMELY odd. Anyway, SL had moments too where it would spin up my drive for no reason and I was just fed up with messing around in terminal. In the end, use the shell script command that allows you to eject and mount your optibay with ease.

Haven't tried that. I actually know nothing about shell scripts. Can you give me a little more specific info? If i did this, would I have to re-mount the drive before I listen to a song in iTunes, or save a Word file? Thanks for the help!!
 
I'm having a similar problem in Mountain Lion with my external 3TB media drive that I use to stream my movie/tvshow/music/photo libraries around the house for AppleTV, etc. On my PPC PowerMac server, it would only spin it up when it needed to use it (finder or iTunes, etc.) In Mountain, it spins down only to spin back up again about 20-30 seconds later for reasons that weren't exactly apparent (putting needless wear on the drive when it's not in use).

I read somewhere else on here that it might be Spotlight waking the drive up to look for changes constantly (maybe in Leopard it only looked once in a great while by comparison?). In any case, I removed the drive from the Spotlight Search in the preference pane and now it appears (so far) to stay asleep until I actually need it. The down side is I apparently won't get search results from Spotlight anymore (too bad you can't set the search intervals for specific drives or whatever).
 
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