OS X Technologies :: USB Drive Spin-up Causes Frequent UI Delays?
May 21, 2012
There appears to be a rather serious (IMHO) design oversight in OS X's file system routines, as concerns the handling of external drives with power-save features. I've never bothered mentioning this online before, as I've always expected it to be resolved, "in the next update". But I've been waiting now since 10.4 Tiger and nothing yet. So I figured I'd raise the issue in here, at least to see what others might have to say about it.
I keep an external (Seagate) USB drive connected to my personal iMac, for use mostly by Time Machine. I'm sure I'm by no means alone in this practice. :-D The drive is, of course, modern and nice enough to power down when not in use (well, "spin down" at least.) The trouble is, even though OS X's disk caching system really ought to know (IMHO) that the drive has not been unplugged or accessed by anything else since OS X itself last did so -- alas, for the likes of Save As ... dialog boxes, we still get a several-second Finder UI "lock up" -- usually accompanied by "the spinning beach-ball of death" -- while the OS merely waits for the external USB drive to spin up and say, "Yup. Still here. Nothing has changed and all is well. Carry on!", before finally presenting the list of places I might want to save my file at.
This happens in all applications, apparently any and every time the OS wants to refresh the list of available storage devices. So it's obviously an OS X cache/driver issue, as opposed to anything in user-land. Wouldn't you agreed?
I guess my first question would have to be, "Is there something I've not been able to find, which I can in fact already do to fix this problem?"
I know it's not just me, actually, because we have five (5) Macs in and about the home office, which all exhibit this highly frustrating behavior. Two use Seagate USB drives (one is 5.25", the other 3.5") while two others use Western Digital drives and the final has two Samsung drives, in custom enclosures. In fact, that last machine -- with an second drive solely for additional mass storage -- has us waiting while both drives spin up, in turn, which is frankly just terrible.
Indeed, the retired TV producer gentleman who owns this particular machine, swears that his iMac is, "the worse Mac I've ever owned", solely because of this problem of, "... constant $@#% delays ...", as he puts it.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to convince the old fellow that doing a full system re-install is highly unlikely to fix his problem. He harkens back to the days of OS 7?P.S: While I remember it -- there's another problem you might have come across, whereby if an external display is connected but turned off, the UI (mouse pointer etc) continuously pauses about even second or so, forcing me to either unplug the external (DVI) display or leave it turned on, even when I'm not using it for hours on end. This one is not nearly such a biggie as the USB drive one, in my view. But a curiosity, none the less.
I am not quite sure the difference between the AUTO and ON power options. When I have it set to ON the drive will power on when the computer powers on, power off when the computer powers off and it will spin down when it has not been used for a while. Isn't the ON option not supposed to spin down when the drive has not been in use for a while?
Currently the AUTO setting does the same as the ON setting. It powers on and off with the computer and spins down when the drive has not been used in a while.
I have a Macbook Pro that's about two years and 4 months old, running the latest version of Leopard. I was problem free for about two years until last October when my MBP suddenly wouldn't boot up (hung at the grey apple screen). I took it to my University's computer repair center, and they said either there was a corrupt OS file, or my HDD was going bad. I went home and booted from my OSX disc and did a full erase and install. My computer worked fine for a few months following the erase and install
I bought an optibay clone and put it in my 2010 Macbook i5. I have an SSD residing in my standard hard drive bay (because of potential hibernate issues) and the 5400rpm Apple drive + optibay clone in the Superdrive bay. How do I sleep/spin down the 5400rpm drive ? Unmounting doesn't seem to help. Put disk to sleep option in preferences is selected, but it keeps spinning and spinning. What options do we have for sleeping/spinning down this drive within OSX ?
Last night, after a few hours of using it (from 100% to about 8%), I tried turning off the computer for the night. After the dock and everything else disappeared, I got a spinning beach ball of death. The computer wouldn't turn off for at least 15 minutes. I had to do press the power button for 5 seconds to get it to turn off. I restarted it this morning and it seems to be working fine for now, but I'm scared of turning it off again.
Here's what I know: while the beach ball was happening, my wallpaper was still on the screen, the trackpad worked, but the brightness and volumes didn't, so I'm guessing I was logged out and no files were corrupted.
During the beach ball, the hard drive would slow down, then spin back up. I waited until it had slowed down a bit to do the hard reboot. I have to say that I reset the PRAM yesterday morning, thinking it might be good because I changed the hard drive to the Momentus XT last week and I read that you should reset it when you change hardware inside the machine. I did that before the crash, so when it crashed, it was the first time I tried to turn the machine off since resetting the PRAM, could that matter?
This morning, I went to disk utility and repaired permissions, there were probably a few hundred bad permissions, but Mac OS fixed them. I also tried verification, but it was alright. I then ran the daily, weekly and monthly tasks and everything went great.
What should I do? I already have a charger problem and a �screen is too blue whichever way I set it� problem. Do I have a lemon here?
I have Snow Leopard (10.6.8) installed on a solid state drive (SSD). I'm wondering how I can check whether my internal hard drive is spinning or asleep. Is there a diagnostic to test whether a hard drive is spinning?
Info: iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8), 12 GB RAM
When I insert a DVD into the MacBook Pro Drive it makes a loud spin noise and the DVD ejects. I've tried with multiple DVD's and still experiencing the same problem.
Mac OSX v10.4 tiger disk full and now won't start up. It showed lines of adaptec warning: SCSI reset detected and keep coming up non stop. After force quite and now Mac OSX shows blue screen w/spin only; I tried to start with CD but disk drive won't open. How?
When running large keynote files (with some embedded videos) my Keynote pauses sometimes for 30 seconds or so to swap. I figured I'd just add memory, but now I have 2gig and the Activity Monitor shows that keynote is only using about 200 meg. The keynote data file is about one gig, so there is plenty of room to move it all in before I start my presentation. Any way I can make keynote run load all at once and run directly from memory? Obviously it works better for me if all the delay is at startup time when my audience is still out of the room .
I reviewed the guide about saving your media on a external drive and accessing it via the Internet and successfully set that up. I have about 700 GBs of space available on that all setup through my AEBS. Would it be possible to store my media (music/movies) on that and stream them from there when I am remotely (i.e. at work, starbucks, etc...). What sort of delays would I be seeing in the streaming process? My connection at home is roughly 7 down and 1.5 upload.
I'm using Mac mail. I have a hotmail acct that I use MBOX mail as a go-between between it and Mac Mail so I can use IMAP and get me hotmail folders etc. It's working great escept for the fact that sometimes there are long delays where I don't receive emails that are coming in. Sometime not even when I click "get mail." I have to right click on the account and click "get info." That will start showing all the data on the account and usually bring in the new emails that have been sitting there for a while.
This was a big selling point of the service -- being able to send direct links to people via email to allow them to download files from your iDisk (like [URL]). Not only is it not there, but according to a thread on Apple Support, Apple has removed the video presentation of the feature from the web site.
I'd like a script that will mount a firewire drive at a specific time (let's say 10pm) even if the computer is asleep. I can get the ID from Disk Utility.
Every time I back up to my external drive Time Machine automatically backs up the whole hard drive which is very time consuming. This happens every time I back up. It's supposed to only add new files, not do the whole thing. Haven't changed user name or any of the things mentioned in other discussions that will cause this. Does some setting need to be changed?
Info: MacBook (13-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I've got a Mac Pro 2008, with 4 noisy hard drives in it.
I wonder if there is an easy way to manually spin down/up the unused harddrives when you feel for it? (That would be much easier that powering down the whole computer, and unplug the disks.
A couple of weeks ago I was running Parallels on my Macbook Pro. I had inserted a USB stick to get a file from it to windows. In doing so, the Macbook completely froze. I took the battery out and disconnected the power supply and waited for about a minute before booting it up again.
When I booted the Mac, it looked like it was starting up fine. However, it got to the point where it loaded my wallpaper, opened Finder and then froze for a few seconds. It appeared to try and restart again, got to the same point, froze and has been in a spin ever since.
I booted the Macbook Pro off the OS disc holding the D down to do the hardware test and it came back fine. I also reinstalled just the OS, but I'm still having problems. I ran the Mac if verbose mode too and I managed to get a crash log. I wasn't able to access it until last week as the Mac was in a spin. For some reason last week I put the Mac into sleep mode and the next day I was able to see the hard drive (though I'm not able to run anything as it seems to want the admin to login - which I am).
When I go to turn on my MacBook pro nothing happens. No sound no hd spin no nothing. Last put computer to sleep and had it plugged in charging. Now when plugged in led doesn't turn green or any color just stays off and battery detector on side of laptop does nothing at all.
I was noticing a lot of slow-down while playing computer games on my MBP. My computer far exceeds the minimum requirements for everything, so I reckoned it must have been something other than a slow processor (2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo), low ram (4 GB) or a completely inadequate graphics card (Nvidia 9400M). The games range from 'Day of Defeat: Source' to the 8 year-old 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein'. After a bit of research, I came to realise that my exhaust fan is never speeding up past 2005 RPM no matter WHAT the load on the CPU is. To test this, I downloaded smcFanControl and ran CPUTest. As the CPU went from 50*C to 95*C, there was hardly any change in the fan's speed. The variation went between 1995 and 2005 RPM.
In order to keep the computer relatively cool when playing games or doing anything that is CPU-heavy, I have to manually increase the fan's RPM in smcFanControl. I find that setting the fans to the maximum, 6000 RPM, keeps the computer cool enough to process these games. This program works wonders and I've not had any slow-down in games as a result. However, I am worried that there might be something wrong with my Mac. Why does it not automatically increase fan speed when reaching higher temperatures? I've even reset my SMC (SHIFT-CONTROL-OPTION-Power) on start-up just to be sure I've tried everything. Any suggestions as to why my fan seems stuck at 2000 RPM?
I have some iMacs (running 10.5.6) each with an external direct-connect FireWire hard drive. About every ten minutes, these drives will spin up for a minute or two, then spin down again.
Background: The drives are set as Time Machine backup volumes on their respective iMacs. I assume the frequent accesses I observer are not related to Time Machine (because the accesses are much more frequent than the hourly backup schedule). The drives are not remote-mounted anywhere.
My computer stays at about 40C normally but when I watch videos or dvds my computer gets as hot as 81C but the fan is still at 2000 rpm. If my fan spun faster it should dissipate the heat more right? Is my fan supposed to spin faster? btw I put my umbp (mid 09 2.53ghz) on a fan cooler by antec.
I've recently uninstalled Fan Control and smcFanControl from my Macbook Pro, after trying them for a minute or two. I reset my SMC by using the method on Apples website (Clicking Shift-CTRL-Option-Power Button at the same time). It haven't worked it seem, as I have tried running some games and even at 85-90C degree, its not increasing its RPM. I don't wanna go any higher as I don't wanna risk the CPU overheating.
I have 5 external USB disks on my little Mac Mini, and I've noted that if I don't access them for a time they spin down, and the next time I access them I have to wait for them to spin back up again. I don't care for that, and would rather they stayed spun up.
Is there some system setting or UNIX trick I can use to bring that about? Seems there should be?
Setting aside criticisms and the general derision that seem to attend this sidekick program of Toast, it's...what...I'm...used...to.Except now on a G5 desktop upgraded to 10.5.8 (end o' the line for this beast) I can record an LP on CD Spin Doctor (companion to Toast 8 that came on this used G5--I used to use Toast 6 on an older G4--10.3.x) but either trying to play or edit tracks brings up the spinning pinwheel of death.
Going back to the ironically named CD Spin Doctor 2 which is the companion to the earlier Toast 6 is the same difficulty. Restarting doesn't help and there is nothing to do with this unedited LP track except Force Quit. I did finally save it but I still can't play or edit it.IknowIknowIknow about Spin Doctor and Leopard (and that's not even relevant here), but did compatibility for these older Spin Doctor versions run out somewhere in OS 10.4?
My 11 month old macbook pro (2011) was recently sent under warrenty for Harddisk SPIN RETRY COUNT value increase. They changed the harddisk and installed new Toshiba harddisk. Which ran 100% S.M.A.R.T health for two weeks and now it is showing same Spin retry count problem. I am thinking its not the harddisk but something else is causing the problem( may be power supply problem). I am from nepal so it takes a lot of effort to send it in for repair.
When I turn my computer on or wake it up, I am 'connected' or so it says, but I am never able to reach the internet until I (wait a long, seemingly random amount of time or) disable my wireless adapter, re-enable it, and select my wireless network.
I did not experience this problem prior to:
-Trying out a new AirPort Extreme, returning it and going back to my old G router. The AirPort worked great for this computer, but it had problems with the PCs and the xbox 360 (yes.. i know there is a workaround now...)
I have a linksys BEFSX41 v2.1 router (not wireless, hard wired) router. Ever since I hooked my macbook to it is appears that it drops and the reconnects regularly in regards to iChat. I am using my AIM screen name, and I receive this message "Error: Serv:RequestTimeout" frequently. This makes it tough because I can never tell if the person got my last IM or not, and since my screen name signs off and then back on again all the time it drives my friends insane.
I can get AV chat going, and I can use screen share with other macs. I enabled UPnP on my router in hopes that would work but it does not appear to have fixed it. I tried opening up a port that I heard AIM uses (5190) but that didnt fix things either. I'm thinking opening ports probably wont work since if I can IM people, or AV chat without having opened any ports then the program must be already opening ports as needed on its own.
