WD My Passport 1TB External Drive No Spin Down

[Tknull]

I have a Seagate drive that once i don't need to use it and i drag its icon to the trash, and it unmounts, the drive spins down. I then unplug the USB cable.
I just bought a Western Digital My Passport 1TB drive. It does not spin down. I unmount it, and the icon disappears, but the drive just keeps on spinning away. Makes me nervous to unplug it, as I feel like its doing something. Is this normal or an issue?

 

[Tknull]

Well.. I have discovered the following:

1) My old drive now does the same thing. It does not spin down after unmounting... AFTER I reformatted with encryption enabled.

2) Found a forum where a few users reported a similar issue with drives that they had encrypted. One had a thunderbolt drive, the other a USB 3.0.

So it seems that in OSX if you format using their Extended Encrypted option, it results in the drive not spinning down after unmounting. This is very disconcerting.

 

[opinio]

Well.. I have discovered the following:

1) My old drive now does the same thing. It does not spin down after unmounting... AFTER I reformatted with encryption enabled.

2) Found a forum where a few users reported a similar issue with drives that they had encrypted. One had a thunderbolt drive, the other a USB 3.0.

So it seems that in OSX if you format using their Extended Encrypted option, it results in the drive not spinning down after unmounting. This is very disconcerting.

It shouldn't be an issue though. As long as you have unmounted or ejected the disk it won't lose data. The platters might be spinning but it is not writing data.

I have a many external HDs and not all of them spin down anyway.