OSX unnecessarily wakes external drive - can this be changed?

It happens when i go to some webpages... why this happens ive no idea and why the web browser needs to access my external hard drives is another mystery

Has anyone from Apple responded to this?

I'm on 10.7.3. My external drive still pauses my quad-core i7 with 16GB RAM. It's embarrasing.

I'm about to move Time Machine to a NAS just to avoid this issue.

can you tell me how to do this?

i dont want to buy the expensive time machine capsual i do have 1tb NAS drive tho

time machine backup is fantastic.... very simple but limited things u can do with it... (Apple loves to dictate what we can and cant do) 😟

It's still not solved completely yet but I significantly reduced the spin trigger time making this I'd encountered on net:

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Mac-OS-X-have-to-spin-up-my-external-hard-drive-ev ery-time-I-browse-files-on-my-internal-HDD

Simon Heimlicher, Rechercheur

This might be related to the File Open and File Save dialog boxes to actually reading from your volume without you expecting it. There are several possible reasons:

• It could be that you have recently saved to a location on the volume. In that case, the volume will be listed under "Recent Places" in the popup menu that is normally used to go up in the hierarchy
• The external volume itself, or the Computer location might be listed in your sidebar. Try unchecking everything under Devices in Finder's Sidebar Preferences

at energy saving I empty all and marked only "Automatically reduce brightness..."

it's still spinning sometimes but it's tolerable now.

I'll make other changes

Still on Finder Preferences:

unmark all itens of "Show these items on the desktop"

I have the 2 Samsung Story 1.5TB usb driver and they are "Green" so they always want to sleep it seems even thoug all my energy settings say not to sleep. The circuictry inside them is the problem. My mac mini - i7 brand new also hickups when I open a file or browse the web sometime AND my main drive is a SSD too!!! A noticible delay - very annoying. They make this annoying baaaaahhhhhh sound like little sheep every time I access a file on them while they are sleeping!

Just tried removing the devices in the side bar of finder as suggested above and the drives now have done their thing and gone to sleep. I actually want them to be spinning all the time as they are for my medial / video and I access them often form my ipad via the program "Air video server".

Will report back in a couple of days but I think the only way is to perhaps take them out of the existing enclosure and put them in different, non green ones but I also suspect that its the actual operating system / hardware of the drive therefore we can probably not do anything about it 😟

I have the same issue with Lacie 1 TB. 😟

Is there no shortcut to mounting an ext drive?

This issue is annoying enough to make me unmount all externals. If I need one they're still plugged in, but I need Disk Utility to spark them up; takes a moment or two but still preferable to waiting a moment or two every time I mouse over the wrong menu...

A quicker 'mount' method, anyone?

This issue has driven me crazy for years. I have two 5 disk RAID boxes for storing video footage and they both spin down when not in use, but my Mac Pro has to wake up all 10 of those drives whenever I try to search for an e-mail in the Mail app. And the more disks, the longer the delay. These two are completely unrelated and I'm amazed that Apple hasn't figured out a solution yet. Hopefully they addressed it in Mountain Lion, but I'm not holding my breath.

I have a similar issue, I have a Samsung Story 2TB disk, and it does spin really frequently, however it does not freeze my computer nor does the beach ball apear.

Instead, the disk freezes from time to time, trying to remove it does not work and the last resort is to turn it off and turn it on again. This has proven really hard since I'm trying to move a 1TB disk to this 2TB disk, and it keeps freezeng and I have to continue the moving of files.

I have noticed that if time machine starts to backup to the Samsung Story drive it will freeze with a high certainty.

There is one simple answer as to WHY a HDD access does block the computer, and it is called IRQ. The CPU must halt whenever an IRQ is sent by a HW device. This is obscured by most OSes, why this is exposed by the beach ball in Mac OS X is still a mistery.

I, too, notice the drive spinning up for no reason in random intervals, even while I am not doing anything but reading a PDF (and even with time machine disabled).

Has anyone noticed if this is still an issue with Mountain Lion? I hope not. I haven't upgraded yet.

I have mountain lion but I gave up on these drives long ago. Just go and buy some drives that actually work or connect them to another computer and access them over the network.

The spinning beach ball is the drive waking up and being read by the computer - nothing you can do about it unlesss you can find some program to keep them awake all the time, ping the drive every so often - sure there is a program like that around.

It still persists in Mountain Lion. Whatever causes the issue must be integral to how the Mac OS X foundation is structured.

Since I posted here a while back, my internal drive crapped out and I've replaced it with a super-quick 120gb SSD. It occurred to me, as there's nothing to spin up with a solid state drive, there should be no delay if you use one as an external.

Anyone ever try this? I'm using a faster-starting portable 2.5 500gb and suffering a lot less than I was with the WD 3.5 1tb I used before. With a small internal I'm seriously considering a $500 splurge on eSATA.