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Why os x always waking external drives for unrelated actions
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Feb 2008
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So I have two external USB 2.0 drives connected to my Mini. I am trying to figure out why it wakes my external drives when they have nothing to do with the action i am trying to do. This is annoying behavior because for the 5-10 seconds that they are waking the beach ball appears and the computer is unresponsive.
Two things will always cause this
1. going to Hulu - when Hulu loads and the images of the featured shows start side scrolling or I click the arrows to force to show me next slide they start to wake up. (doesn't matter what browser I use)
2. when selecting a video file in the finder - these are files not on either of the external drives - this doesn't happen when selecting a photo in the pic folder though
this has happened with snow leopard and still happens with lion. i dont know about leopard or before since i did not have external drives before that
I just find this to be odd/slightly annoying behavior and was curious what might cause this
thanks
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Posting Junkie
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The one that annoys me is closing a document in TextEdit (or any other autosave-aware app) that hasn't been saved yet. Especially if my intention was just to open up TextEdit, type up a phone number that someone was dictating over the phone, then delete it after I'd dialed the number... except it takes 10 seconds to get rid of the TextEdit window.
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Clinically Insane
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Posting Junkie
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Stickies isn't versatile enough. There are a lot of things to use temporary TextEdit windows for which Stickies can't do as easily. For example, let's suppose I come across a web page that's impossible to read because the designer didn't take into account red-green colorblindness when he/she designed the color scheme. Often I will just copy the text of the page, paste it into TextEdit, then ⌘⇧T to convert to plain text, and then read it. You could technically do that with Stickies, but it'd be a hassle compared to just doing it in TextEdit.
Anyway, the point is that it shouldn't need to wake up all disks just to ask you to save something whose default destination is just going to be the Documents folder or something anyway.
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Clinically Insane
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I was half-kidding. Stickies is so *ancient*, it still has window-shade.
Also, the spinning-up-the-drives pisses me off to no end when I'm browsing. There's certain sites that will invariably require ALL attached drives to spin up — and waiting on seven hard drives for no discernable reason at all is infuriariting.
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Moderator
Join Date: Oct 2001
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To get back to the OP's question, I believe that any action that requires the Finder will wake up a drive. So even if the video is not on the external drive, the Finder itself needs access to all drives whenever it is active.
As far as Hulu or a web site causing this, perhaps it has to do with web caching or cookies, things that need to be written to a drive and the browser wakes all drives for some reason.
Simple solution if it bothers you too much: turn off drive sleep in Energy Saver preferences.
Steve
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Celebrating 10 years and 4000 posts on MacNN!
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Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot
and waiting on seven hard drives for no discernable reason at all is infuriariting.
Yes and why the hell can't it wake them all at once? Hearing them lethargically go off one by one adds insult to injury.
Originally Posted by ibook_steve
Simple solution if it bothers you too much: turn off drive sleep in Energy Saver preferences.
That's what I did. Sad that it is necessary.
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Mac Elite
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I've hated this behavior from the beginning of OS X. It's really my only big gripe still remaining.
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Originally Posted by ibook_steve
To get back to the OP's question, I believe that any action that requires the Finder will wake up a drive. So even if the video is not on the external drive, the Finder itself needs access to all drives whenever it is active.
I thought this too at first but I dont think its the case that just using the finder will cause it. i use the finder a lot in column view , and the drives won't spin up, till i either click on one of the drives in the side bar or click on certain files (seems to be usually video files) so when the preview column is shown it starts to spin up. I think it might have to do with spotlight or quicksilver indexing new files which are usually the files i am going to
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Last edited by BigWheel88; Sep 2, 2011 at 05:17 AM.
)
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Professional Poster
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Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton
Yes and why the hell can't it wake them all at once? Hearing them lethargically go off one by one adds insult to injury.
It probably polls all devices one by one, in order.
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