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what is randomly causing my optibay hdd to spin up

H

happle

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 20, 2010
501
0
im so sick of this thing randomly spinning up on me. it spins up when i open my dashboard. i have istat installed but the hdd section is turned off, why is it still spinning up then?

i have indexing turned off on the hdd and i have cocktail sleeping the drive after 4 mins.

i can't really pinpoint whats making it spin up besides the istat thing which i don't know why. sometimes when i open finder it will spin up or just randomly it will. quite annoying by now. especially since despite what others say hitachi 7k drives are louder than seagate 7200's. i've had two of each drive and every single hitachi has a much louder whooshing sound.
 
TheJing said:
Hahah! Call Apple if you have already tried here with no luck.
Click to expand...

calling apple would be a good idea if replacing your optical drive with a secondary hard drive was covered under warrantee...
 
happle said:
im so sick of this thing randomly spinning up on me. it spins up when i open my dashboard. i have istat installed but the hdd section is turned off, why is it still spinning up then?

i have indexing turned off on the hdd and i have cocktail sleeping the drive after 4 mins.

i can't really pinpoint whats making it spin up besides the istat thing which i don't know why. sometimes when i open finder it will spin up or just randomly it will. quite annoying by now. especially since despite what others say hitachi 7k drives are louder than seagate 7200's. i've had two of each drive and every single hitachi has a much louder whooshing sound.
Click to expand...

+1. My Hitachi HDD in the Optibay also keeps spinning up a couple of mins after having ejected it.

I've heard (from user Satnam1989) you can run the following command in Terminal: sudo fs_usage and then let it run for a while, then check the fs_usage log to see what is accessing your disk0 or disk1 (depends on where your HDD is). I haven't tried it yet, but if you do find a solution, please post it here.
 
In my experience possible causes are NTFS drivers, Spotlight, istat monitoring.
With istat it doesn't matter if the hdd section is turned off. There is also the hdd temps in the sensors section. Everytime the sensors want to read out the smart data (which holds the temps) the drive spins up. It is a bug.
Also in my istat an older version turning of smart monitoring doesn't help either. Only setting the interval to 1h at least makes it bearable.

Turn off istat completely. Switch of Sensors completely. Try truning off all smart data reading and hdd temps but that didn't help in my experience.
 
dusk007 said:
In my experience possible causes are NTFS drivers, Spotlight, istat monitoring.
With istat it doesn't matter if the hdd section is turned off. There is also the hdd temps in the sensors section. Everytime the sensors want to read out the smart data (which holds the temps) the drive spins up. It is a bug.
Also in my istat an older version turning of smart monitoring doesn't help either. Only setting the interval to 1h at least makes it bearable.

Turn off istat completely. Switch of Sensors completely. Try truning off all smart data reading and hdd temps but that didn't help in my experience.
Click to expand...

how do i switch the sensors and smart data off? I'm assuming you mean in general and not within stat.

sucks though, because i kind of like to use istat sometimes...
 
istat is pretty useless. It is nothing but a toy.
The only use I get out of it, is power draw of the battery, so I notice sooner that something might be unnecessarily causing too much load. All the other stuff is a gimmick that no one actually needs. It is kind of the same as with over stuffed docks. Nobody who is sane needs 50 icons in the dock but only the ones that one actually uses daily but some feel somehow better if they stuff the dock with just about anything, not realizing how stupid an incompetent it looks.

Sensors is just everything that is related to Temperatures. In the main Menu I have a slider to shut the whole thing of. And inside the sensor panel there are settings for the Monitor SMART temps with a check box. Though unchecking that box never really helped in my version of istat only setting the frequency to 1 hour did make a difference. Must be some bug.
 
dusk007 said:
istat is pretty useless. It is nothing but a toy.
The only use I get out of it, is power draw of the battery, so I notice sooner that something might be unnecessarily causing too much load. All the other stuff is a gimmick that no one actually needs. It is kind of the same as with over stuffed docks. Nobody who is sane needs 50 icons in the dock but only the ones that one actually uses daily but some feel somehow better if they stuff the dock with just about anything, not realizing how stupid an incompetent it looks.

Sensors is just everything that is related to Temperatures. In the main Menu I have a slider to shut the whole thing of. And inside the sensor panel there are settings for the Monitor SMART temps with a check box. Though unchecking that box never really helped in my version of istat only setting the frequency to 1 hour did make a difference. Must be some bug.
Click to expand...

ok thanks for the input. and btw i have 24 icons on my dock not including trash or the 3 folders. and i use everything in it. not daily, but often enough to where i like to have it as easy as one click away.
 
happle said:
until its fixed.
Click to expand...

Hopefully you figure it out. The more I think about this the more I can't help but wonder if the HDD is just supposed to be spinning. Is it that you are concerned about the sound/vibration issue or the battery life? Did you notice the sound was louder given the optical disk opening vs. shielded in the original location?

Also, is the SMS enabled on the optibay HDD?

Cheers.
 
looks like its time for the OP to get a SSD, I had those on my old 13" '09 MBP and that is one of the main reasons I bought my new 2011 MBA, SSDs + Core i5 on my MBA = AWESOMENESS! :D

Look in to an SSD or a MBA :)
 
hey happle, just eject the drive if you aren't using it....set the sleep time to 1min, so even if something wakes it up, at least it can go back to sleep within 1min...thats wat I do....i notice my Safari(if exited) on initial launch wakes it up, same with few other apps....but its not a biggy...i think ur over stressing about the whole HDD SLEEP/SPINDOWN issue....


Two things no matter what will happen:

1) If you don't use the drive as much then eject it which will decrease how often randoms apps will cause it to wake up, no solution but you can run "sudo fs_usage" to check it out if u got the time(seems like you do since u post to ask weekly)

2) set spin down time to 1min....helps me...but even then some apps do wake it up every now and then and the good thing about 1min sleep is that the drive is back asleep again cause the random things that wake it up aren't as frequent.
 
Satnam1989 said:
hey happle, just eject the drive if you aren't using it....set the sleep time to 1min, so even if something wakes it up, at least it can go back to sleep within 1min...thats wat I do....i notice my Safari(if exited) on initial launch wakes it up, same with few other apps....but its not a biggy...i think ur over stressing about the whole HDD SLEEP/SPINDOWN issue....
Click to expand...

its not a big deal its just annoying hearing it spin up and then down for no reason. and yeah it spins up when i open word and ppt too, probably because my documents are on my hdd. I'm gonna try that command later to see whats using my drive.
 
happle said:
its not a big deal its just annoying hearing it spin up and then down for no reason. and yeah it spins up when i open word and ppt too, probably because my documents are on my hdd. I'm gonna try that command later to see whats using my drive.
Click to expand...

lol ya...if the docs are on your HDD obviously its going to wake it up.....thats common sense....anything located on the HDD if its accessed at any given point it will cause the disk to spin up regardless of settings(unless you eject it)

another scenario where DOCS or PPT will wake up your HDD is if the recent docs that were opened in the program were on the HDD, it will jus wake it up to double check if they are still in that location incase you decide to use the docs file menu to open them......anyway if u really want a solution to sleep your HDD without that many frequent wakes/sleep cycles then you want your home folder, and majority of your daily/weekly accessed files on SSD, do a regular back up with time machine(Weekly) and you have nothing to worry about.
 
Satnam1989 said:
lol ya...if the docs are on your HDD obviously its going to wake it up.....thats common sense....anything located on the HDD if its accessed at any given point it will cause the disk to spin up regardless of settings(unless you eject it)

another scenario where DOCS or PPT will wake up your HDD is if the recent docs that were opened in the program were on the HDD, it will jus wake it up to double check if they are still in that location incase you decide to use the docs file menu to open them......anyway if u really want a solution to sleep your HDD without that many frequent wakes/sleep cycles then you want your home folder, and majority of your daily/weekly accessed files on SSD, do a regular back up with time machine(Weekly) and you have nothing to worry about.
Click to expand...

everything is on the ssd. only thing thats on my hard drive is music, movies, pictures, documents, and my music production files. i don't mind if the drive spins up when i open word or something. i just don't like the fact that sometimes it just spins up on its own. but its not a big deal. it already spins up less with istat deleted and stuff.
 
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