Optibay Spindown Solution

[MarcErland]

Hey Ya'll!

Just registered to this Forum, after reading the forums the last 2 years.

I bought this optibay solution on Ebay 2 weeks ago, and have ever since struggled with the spin-up after 1-5minutes.
I Have a 2010 Mbp 13" with a Agility 3 in the main bay, and a WD Scorpio black 750 in the optibay.
The WD is quite quiet, however when I watch youtube movies and so on the constant noise it makes is kinda disturbing!
Well, I just found the solutions.

I've tried all the other things mentioned earlier in the forums.
1. disable spotlight on the disk
2. disable writings in the NTFS-program.
3. Set the spindown time to 1 minute
4. eject through terminal.

All these worked so so, but the HDD did spin-up after a minute or so..
Until I tried FSeventer, and saw a file called sperion created everytime I heard my disk do a spin-up!
I googled it, and it soon became clear it was a copy-protection program installed with some other program. Namely Nalpeiron, found in the services.
I started Onyx, set the attribute to show hidden files, checked "library-Startup-" and there it was. So I just deleted the file, and had to shut down the process called "nalpeiron" och i fixed my occasional spin-ups!

However, the internet tells me if I delete this program, the program it came with wouldn't be working anymore. I've tried all my programs I use everyday and couldnt find any! So I guess it could be some I've tried long ago...

Hope this will help you as well!
Kind Regards!
Marcus E
Sweden

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I even have the disk still mounted and it doesn't spin-up until I try to access a file stored on the HDD..
Works like a charm!

 

[Quinoky]

Hey Marcus, thanks for sharing. I've tried this Optibay thing too with the terminal eject, everything you described actually. What bothered me most was that with anything storage-related, it would spin up, for example if I had to choose a file location for a document. So I abandoned the Optibay route for now. Does this method actually stop it from spinning up in such situations as well? Even when you're, for example, opening disk utility? Because in that case I'd be completely sold and will definitely give it another go.

 

[MarcErland]

Well, just tried it. And it only spins up once I try to access the disk when saving a file, or when I open Disk Utility. After 1 minute it spins down again, and stayed that way all day

 

[dusk007]

If the drive is ejected aka unmounted it shouldn't spinup if you open some save dialog.
It should only do so (and there is no solution afaik to stop it) if spun down on its own due to the timer but isn't actually unmounted.

Diskutility will always make it spin up. If it didn't there would be no way to access the drive ever. It needs to spin up to be mounted.

In my experience it was NTFS and istat that cause spin ups. Running it with exFAT even Spotlight is no problem anymore.

 

[GaryPDX]

I found this thread when I came across a sperion file in my private/tmp fielder while doing something else. It turns out that it is part of the ProTec copy protection system. In my case, it came with Nik Software's HDR Efex Pro.

There are other files as well. in /Library/StartupItems there are ProTec6 and ProTec6b. Also:
/private/var/run/NalpeirondV.pid
/private/tmp/Perion

In those folders there are a couple of related XML files. I found this stuff by searching on the Moodification Date of the sperion file using Find Any File. These files were all dated within a minute or two of the applications own Modification Date. You can also use the Date Created sometimes to get at even more files. This, combined with some experience and common sense is an effective technique for removing or finding ALL of the files associated with an installation when some of them do not carry the name of the developer or the app.