OS X V10.5 Leopard :: External Hard Drives Spinning Up Incessantly?

Feb 6, 2012

I have 4 external drives with about 12 volumes on them and it's literally spinning up a drive every 5 minutes, 24x7 when I am not even using the computer. Nothing weird is running, and it's clear the application is exactly Finder. (and rarely, fseventsd).Here is the output of

[code]....

Note the 02:10:12 "all drives spin up" event.That was opening a PDF in Preview.  The PDF was in my home directory/Downloads on "Macintosh HD".The rest is entirely Finder; I was doing nothing at all. I'm hearing a spool-up literally every 4-5 minutes. I have essentially given up, and dismounted all the drives until I have need for something on one of them.  Of course that kills Time Machine.

Since there is no rime or reason for these accesses, I am NOT impressed with the argument that "drives should spin 24x7, it's better for them".This is a home system, not a server.  I know how often I actually need data off these drives - several times a day and many days not at all.So I should use a program to force them to spin 24x7 (by doing more unnecessary accesses)?  That's like leaving a hot water faucet open 24x7 to deal with a glitch in an on-demand water heater.

I want the drives to spin down.And stay spun down.And then, when I choose to access something on one of the drives, or an application has something it's going to actually use the drive for (e.g. midnight backups) -- I want it to spin up. Simple enough?I am running 10.5 but my searches tell me Snow Leopard is worse, and Lion is worse yet.

Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

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