OSX unnecessarily wakes external drive - can this be changed?

Those of you with waking up Macs and disk drives: Are you using Thunderbolt anything?

not here, just a DisplayPort to DVI Adapter. But then, I managed to solve this by switching off splotlight whereas others have tried this to no avail, so might be unrelated causes for similar symptoms. Thought i'd post anyway.

Thunderbolt replaces DisplayPort; same connector though.

So let me re-phrase:

Those of you with waking up Macs and disk drives: Are you using Thunderbolt or DisplayPort anything?

I am experiencing this using a thunderbolt WD external drive.

Just to make sure Apple continues to see the widespread effect, and how there's no shortage of people annoyed at this, I'm tossing my hat into the ring. Same problem, external WD 2TB USB drive wakes up every so often and freezes the entire OS for a handful of seconds.

I'm one of those keyboard people, and while developing software I can get on a roll, flying through windows, menus, and other typing. This really knocks the wind out of the momentum. Apple, please fix this.

Message was edited by: Vurcease to fix ridiculous spelling mistakes.

Are people still having the problem after upgrading to Mavericks (OS X 10.9). I've been using it for a day now and everything seems much snappier - even with my external drives mounted. Curious if it is just my imagination or if Apple finally addressed this problem?

As I posted in another topic, so far I am having trouble with my external drives not sleeping after a period of inactivity with Mavericks installed. So Waking Up is obviously not an issue.

I was sitting at my desk and noticed that all my external drivers were asleep.

1. I launched preview and all the external drives remained asleep.
2. I did file->open and all external drives remained asleep (the directory visible in the open dialog was on my internal/system drive).
3. I selected one of the external drives in the devices section of side bar in the open dialog and that drive spun up (only the drive I selected).
4. I selected my computer (also under the devices section in the side-bar) and all the drives spun up.

I would say that overall this is fixed. The system is much snappier all around!

Ok looks like this might be fixed in Mavricks. It's also a function of the drive and not the OS so apple can't really do anything about this. Get rid of offending drives and try different brand, mac specific brand perhaps. My 3Tb segates USB behaved badly in ML but in Mavericks they now appear to be aways when I need them to be so perhaps Apple is on this.

It's not fixed for me. I am running Mavericks and the same thing is happening as before - browsing the web, click on a link to jump to a new page and the hard drives suddenly wake up and the browser freezes until they spin up. Why does an external hard drive need to be woken up to navigate to a web page?

richpjr you need to dump that drive and get a new one. The power saving features are a function of the drive hardware / enclousure too so unless you run the computer 24/7 without sleeping it you will probably always have this problem. You might even have to resort to buying them from the apple store but at least you can take them back and get a refund if they don't work. Avoid any "green" drives, my samsung drives had this problem and I had to eventually get rid of them due to this.

There may be a utiity to keep the drives spinning but none I know of.

I have external drives from a variety of manufacturers - they all spin up at inappropriate times, and simultaneously. It's obviously the OS, not the drives.

Intergalatic - what OS you running?

10.6.8

Wow, that's donkys years old - you're asking for trouble. Stick with firewire drives.