Hard disk spins up every time I unlock my screen...

irchs

Hello!



Ever since upgrading to leopard, my external hard disks always spin up when I unlock my screen, regardless of whether they are actually being accessed or not.



Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a way to revert to the Tiger behavior, where the disks would stay idle?



Cheers



Jan

adders

Hard disks spinning up normally indicates they've first spun down, which means you need to have a look at energy saver if you don't want to them to go to sleep.



-Go to System Preference>Energy Saver.

-First thing to try is unchecking 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible'

-See how long the slider under 'Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:'is set to(if the computer goes to sleep then of course the hard drives go with it). I normally go for 20 minutes, but it's your preference really.

irchs

ah, I want them to spin down as they do now. I don't want them to spin up every time I unlock my screen as they do currently under Leopard. I just want them to spin up when they are being accessed as they did on Tiger.



Any ideas?



Jan

adders

They start spinning up before or after typing the password?

irchs

Before for sure

adders

It really sounds like a natural waking up from computer sleeping behaviour to me. This is how our G5 used to wake under Tiger from sleep and it behaves the same now under Leopard.



If you don't want it every time, think about sleeping the display only on a shorter period and setting the computer to sleep on a longer time. But I don't think there's anything abnormal here.

irchs

My problem with this behaviour is that the disks are spinning up even though they are not being accessed. I would prefer the disks stay idle until they are actually needed. One of my external disks is used for backup for example, and I only really want it to spin up when backing up. This certainly didn't happen under Tiger.

synthetic frost

Quote:

Originally Posted by irchs


My problem with this behaviour is that the disks are spinning up even though they are not being accessed. I would prefer the disks stay idle until they are actually needed. One of my external disks is used for backup for example, and I only really want it to spin up when backing up. This certainly didn't happen under Tiger.

Then don't use OS X. This is absolutely normal operation for most Unix based systems. Unlike Windows, OS X will ALWAYS have a lot of processes running in the background regardless if you haven't been "using" the system that are constantly cleaning the system, organizing files, checking disk status, etc.



In the System Preferences there is the option of putting the hard disks to sleep, but in my 8 years of using OS X, I've never once heard them actually spin down when the computer was idle. I had to actually set the machine to go to complete sleep mode for it to do that.



This won't harm your computer, the hard drives won't fail any sooner. It's perfectly normal.

irchs

Quote:

Then don't use OS X. This is absolutely normal operation for most Unix based systems. Unlike Windows, OS X will ALWAYS have a lot of processes running in the background regardless if you haven't been "using" the system that are constantly cleaning the system, organizing files, checking disk status, etc.

Thanks for implying that I am some kind of tool with experience of windows only. I am aware that OS X has background processes that will likely access the hard drive.



My external hard disk ONLY spins up when I am accessing it (e.g. I am in front of my machine browsing the file system on the external disk) or annoyingly, when I unlock my machine. My question relates to when I unlock my computer. I suspect OS X is spinning up the drives anticipating that I may use them once my machine is unlocked. However, I tend not to, and this didn't happen under Tiger. My question was has anyone else noticed this change in behaviour, and is there an option to control what happens?



btw, I am sure that most versions of Windows have context switching/multi threading and that the developers of windows have made use of this feature to create these mysterious background processes you speak of. Also, why would I buy a Mac to not run OS X?



Anyone with half a brain care to share their experiences? It's quite a specific problem, but the behaviour has definitely changed between the two releases, and it would be nice to have the old behaviour back My external HDD's are noisy power eaters and I would like them to be off unless accessed by me or a fabled background process.

synthetic frost

Quote:

Originally Posted by irchs


Thanks for implying that I am some kind of tool with experience of windows only. I am aware that OS X has background processes that will likely access the hard drive.



My external hard disk ONLY spins up when I am accessing it (e.g. I am in front of my machine browsing the file system on the external disk) or annoyingly, when I unlock my machine. My question relates to when I unlock my computer. I suspect OS X is spinning up the drives anticipating that I may use them once my machine is unlocked. However, I tend not to, and this didn't happen under Tiger. My question was has anyone else noticed this change in behaviour, and is there an option to control what happens?



btw, I am sure that most versions of Windows have context switching/multi threading and that the developers of windows have made use of this feature to create these mysterious background processes you speak of. Also, why would I buy a Mac to not run OS X?



Anyone with half a brain care to share their experiences? It's quite a specific problem, but the behaviour has definitely changed between the two releases, and it would be nice to have the old behaviour back My external HDD's are noisy power eaters and I would like them to be off unless accessed by me or a fabled background process.

I didn't mean to imply anything about your intelligence. I was merely explaining that OS X's background processes access the hard disks far more often than most other OS's. But no, I never noticed a change between Tiger and Leopard in this respect.



My hard drives always spun up when I unlocked the screen.

irchs

hhhhhmmmm.... I just double checked with my backup Tiger install and the behaviour is definitely different. Very bizarre indeed. I was just hoping that Apple left a plist option somewhere for us to tweak. I wonder whether spotlight indexes plists....



Cheers



Jan