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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Oct 14, 2010
Just updated to 10.6 from 10.4, and one of the first things I notice is that it keeps spinning up my three external harddrives at actions that should not set them in use, like starting an application or opening the trash. It seems pretty random, though I'm suspecting it has something to do with mdworker, quicklookd or both. If anyone knows of a solution that doesn't involve unmounting the harddrives, do tell.
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Jan 11, 2011
i am very interested in buying a Mac. But I need an external hard drive for my stuff. What are the best 1TB or higher external hard drives for a Mac Book Pro?
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Feb 2, 2009
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup:
Mac OS X 10.5.6
PowerPc G5
Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
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Feb 25, 2009
I often use external hard drives to back up my work. Recently I purchased a 1TB Lacie drive. I took a week to build a lovely new file structure for my work. At the end of this week, I began deleting the old files on other hard drives so as to transfer my new neatly structured work back on. In the midst of this, the brand new hard drive crashed, illiciting only the clicking sound of death.
That hard drive, some of my work (a very small amount but still) and a week's worth of sweat and blood was gone in an instant. The person I took it to to look at it mentioned a power surge as being a possible cause for the crash. Anyway, I returned the lacie and bought a 1T Western Digital Mybook (silver). I then began dumping the old back ups onto this.
A week in and this one is crashed too. No clicking sound of death. It calmly sits on my desk with it's unceasing unblinking blue light and refuses to show up in utilities no matter what I do. So I assume it's a goner also. I'll return it also of course. Is something causing these drives to fail...that exists in my walls? Are there power surges causing my drives to die...? OR is it simply a case of bad luck with my choices of new drives?
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Apr 19, 2010
I was done doing various tasks on the iMac and when I decided to plug in the external hard drive for a Time Machine backup, the drive spun, but was never shown on the desktop.I also tried another external drive and had the same thing happen.
After rebooting (hey, this sounds like Windows!), the drive again showed up on the desktop and Time Machine worked fine.Is an external hard drive not showing up on the desktop a somewhat common issue?
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Apr 20, 2010
i'm cloning my mac hd (mac book pro, snow leopard) and though i've made successful clones, the sum of the hard drives (mac hd and external hd) don't match. for instance, my mac hd reads at: 233.71 GB, however the cloned external hd reads at: 216.54 GB. can anyone explain this discrepancy? are there certain things that don't go into the clone that are on the mac hd?
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Oct 26, 2010
Having chosen a useful large external hard drive I find it says 'Windows only'. Surely, though the software will not work, all I need to do is format the HD and it will work. The machine is: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive USB2.0 16MB.
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Oct 29, 2006
I am relatively new to Macs, have been using it for 5-6 months. I already know how to do everything but share folders and drives using my network connection. I have an iMac and a Macbook Pro. I have a 120GB Hard Drive hooked up to the iMac via Firewire. How can I share that Firewire External Hard Drive with my Macbook Pro? What are the steps I have to follow to connect both macs? Is there a way that I could also share my iMac's desktop files with my Macbook Pro? I already have a wi-fi connection between both computers, I just don't know how to share that hard drive between both simultaneously..
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Dec 11, 2008
I have been using a MBP for a few months now and I am making a total conversion from PC user to Mac user in January when I buy a nice new 24" iMac but to go with it, I want to buy a couple of new external hard drives. I have currently got a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB USB Drive which is Windows Formatted and I will be keeping that to use with my work laptop (a Dell), and I have been really pleased with its reliability. Anyway, I have been looking around and there are some fab drives on the market but I have a couple of questions. If I get an iMac with a 500GB Internal Hard Drive, how big an External hard drive will I need to use Time Machine without having to delete backups all the time?
Also, I have been primarily looking at the new Seagate FreeAgent drives and the do a PC version (USB) and a Mac version (USB/FW400/FW800), but the 640GB USB version costs �76 whereas the 500GB FW version costs �100. Would you go for the bigger size or the added benefits of FW800? Will I notice much speed difference between USB and FW800?
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Feb 26, 2009
What is the best external hard drive with 1TB for the new Macbooks? I heard a rumor the new Macbooks don't have firewire... is that true?
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Jul 25, 2009
I have an external hard drive that I have been using for my Pcs, and when I hook it up to my mac I cannot write to it (although I can read from it). Is it possible to write to this external hard drive?
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Oct 4, 2009
I can't figure out the difference between these two hard drives, they look identical but Amazon says the latter one is the "newer" version, are they the same thing?
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Mar 3, 2010
I have a fairly new iMac that I upgraded to Snow Leopard a few months ago. It seemed to me that prior to that my external HD worked fine with Time Machine. Since then it is recognized for a short period of time when I connect it, then it disappears. I replaced it with a WD My Book. It worked perfectly for a month and now it has shut down. Has anybody had run into this before? I can't believe that every hard drive fails within a month in the same mysterious way!
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May 10, 2010
I've had a LaCie Porsche Design for the last 6 years with no problems but with the upgrade to a MBP I'm looking to get a new portable hard drive (LaCie or another brand). My old LaCie was FW400 so I'd be looking at FW800 now. Which make and model do you use and are you happy with it's performance?
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May 25, 2010
My external hard drive has been corrupted and the error message is telling me to reformat it. However, through all the research I have done to find out how, everything I've found has told me to use Disk Utility to just erase everything on the disk to do this. When I try to do this, it tells me that I can't erase anything because the disk cannot be unnmounted. What should I do?
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Aug 2, 2010
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Aug 14, 2010
So I just installed a larger hard drive in my macbook pro. As OSX was installing I decided to read reviews online (bought it in the store when I got the MBP). They're all really bad about using the drive in a MBP - [URL]. I'm installing the application software now and the hd is spining a lot and vibrating the case and making a lot more noise. I've read a few Seagate reviews and they're not much better for that size.
I want to install a huge hard drive because this is going to be my main computer for at least 8 months while I'm working away from home. Normally I have a desktop w/ a huge hard drive so I don't care what's on my laptop. Anyway, based on these reviews and how the drive has been feeling in the case, I think I might re-evaluate putting a larger drive in, and instead go with an external. I can fit all my photos and music on a 250, but I couldn't fit everything I store on my desktop on a 250.
So my first question is, is there a good, reliable 500gb or larger 5400rpm replacement hard drive for the mbp, that a lot of people like? And then the main question: I have a lot of large video files on my Windows box that are over 4gb, which is the FAT32 limit. When I transferred them from my old computer I had to rar them to smaller files and then un-rar them. This is quite annoying. If I'm gonna have an external drive, I'd like one that can be used on both windows and mac and support 4gb+ files..................
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Can Mac's be started up from external USB2 drives or is external startup limited to firewire only? I have several machines, IMac (all four flavors) Mac Book and Pro. I want to use Time Machine as the back to all of these devices but I hesitate because of this possible restriction.
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Dec 10, 2014
Just bought new version of Final Cut and it will not recognize the external hard drive that I plug into my usb or the extra hard drive that I had installed into my laptop to do video work on for more space.
Info:
Final Cut Pro X, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
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Sep 6, 2010
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Dec 28, 2010
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Sep 17, 2007
This issue has been killing my work flow for quite awhile. I have a G5 dual 2.0. I can barely read or write files to an external hard drive. Say I try and copy 1.56GB of audio (12 files) from my external drive it will start to copy then stop at 500mb for minutes then start moving as normal and stop again around 900 for minutes.. then again at 1.4. This also happens when writing.
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Jun 16, 2008
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Dec 2, 2009
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Dec 30, 2009
My external hard drive suddenly broke on me - the dreaded click of death - and now i am trying to gather as much information as possible about what i had on the drive. I have a slight idea, but i can't really remember everything. So basically what i am wondering, does Mac os x (SL in my case) store some kind of log file (text or similar) with information about what has been moved to external hard drives the past, say, 12 months?
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