Problems with Leopard and external hard drives...

Hi everyone,

I've been a longtime reader of MacRumors and decided to make an account because I need help with a problem my friend and I are experiencing. We both have relatively new (current generation) MacBooks (mine is black, his is white) and we are both experiencing issues with our hard drives. I will separate the problems to make it easier to read:

1. Me: I have a 500GB SimpleTech external that I use for my entire iTunes library. My iTunes library is relatively large (almost 400GB) and lately I have been having problems where if I use iTunes for an extended period of time (i.e. to watch movies or TV shows) then stop using it for awhile, then go back to try and use it again, it "crashes" my hard drive. By this, I mean the following: the hard drive is idle (i.e. not spinning) because it hasn't been in use for awhile. Then when I double click something in iTunes, it tries to start spinning again (I can hear it) but it just continually tries to seek but to no avail. This causes iTunes to hang (won't even force quit), which then causes my Finder to hang (won't relaunch), and then I have to manually power off, because if I try to restart, the restart process just hangs.

2. My friend: My friend has the same type of problem but in a different manner. He has a 19" Sharp monitor and 320GB Western Digital external which he has some media on but they are in .avi so are not in iTunes. Anyway, he'll use VLC Media Player to watch one file, then if he tries to start another one, his Finder hangs, and he has to manually reboot like I do. He thinks it may be a problem regarding the monitor, because he claims it's "not as bad" when the monitor is not attached, but I really feel like it has to do with Leopard and external hard drives.

I don't know if this information helps, but maybe it does:
- Neither of us are using Time Machine (although I previously did and it worked fine, but I've since turned it off)
- If I plug in my external right after turning it on, it works 100% normally; it only messes up after it's been sitting idle for a few hours


If anyone has any insight on this, please, please, please enlighten me. It's driving us crazy.

 

Ok so I checked the Energy Saver settings and the box that says "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is currently checked. Does that mean it will put external hard disks to sleep too? Should I uncheck the box?

 

I tried doing what you said, but the hard drive still spins down. Any other suggestions?