OSX unnecessarily wakes external drive - can this be changed?

This is a Snow Leopard discussion...

I'm getting this problem with Mavericks, WD Studio connected via Firewire to my Thunderbolt screen which is in turn connected to my MacBook. This is also my Time Machine drive.

Drive spins down, I try to open a new tab in Safari, beach ball of DEATH! appears, drive spins up, beach ball disappears and the tab opens up.

Mavericks 27" iMac with Synology NAS. No applications installed on the NAS.

I have tried all the tricks over the past 2+ years I've been following this thread and none of them work.

Right-click on a file to "open with" and the computer halts until the drives in the NAS spin up.

What's the story Apple?

Same story here. The external drive is WD Elements 2 TB drive.

Apple, are you listening? This 'feature' is here for YEARS now and it's just plainly annoying. Fix it, please.

The only way to get attention by Apple is to file bugreports, en masse. Please do so, and if you can relate it to bug ID 15819635

https://bugreport.apple.com

The bugreport address is for developers only.

I realize this is a 10.6 discussion, but I have a similar problem in 10.4.11, and i'll bet the problem still exists in 10.7+ too. I think this problem is endemic to the design of OSX. Similar drive bu11sh1t doesn't happen in Windows XP (I haven't used Win7 enough yet to know, and hopefully never will). My secondary hard drives constantly spin down, then spin back up for no reason whatsoever. I can see it having to spin up your boot drive once in awhile, but not other drives.

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After 4 years I would expect Apple has decided this is a feature and won't remove the behavior.

this issue still exists in Mavericks, c'mon now!

what's the point in a blazing fast internal SSD if a major bottle neck rests in the hands of an old external HDD almost every time I open a finder window

can't finder rely on the spotlight index in some fashion unless the external is selected?

I ended up doing the following trying to see if I can exclude my external drive except when a backup runs.

-In spotlight preferences -> Added external drive to the "Privacy" section to exclude it.

-In Finder -> Preferences -> General, unchecked "external drives". Sidebar -> unchecked "external drives"

The drive is essentially hidden now except for purposes of Time Machine so I will see how this plays out and comment back later if this worked. I only use my external for backups (alternating with time capsule) so theres no need for it to be constantly spinning.

I gave up keeping my USB3 drive from spinning up so now I keep it spinning all the time except when Mac sleeps or shuts down each night. I have to use the app "keep drive spinning" because my drive enclosure will spin down when not in use no matter what the energy settings are on the Mac. I only use my USB drive for Time machine.

This dos not work for me. I figured it out. I never paid much attention before (and most users wouldn't either) but I noticed that I have getting some console messages indicating "wakeups resource spin" if I started an application and noticed my external USB hard drive would start to spin up. I was using this as my Time machine and it would spin down between backups but for no apparent reason would spin up if starting various programs. Tried every possible fix but no luck keeping it from spinning up. I then decided to keep my drive spinning except when my Mac would sleep or shut down at night. Now no more messages. I wonder if Apple did this with FW drives to preclude these logs as well. I figured since my TM drive had to spin up every hour anyway it might as well just stay spinning in between. I do not expect much wear from this approach.

I bought 2 OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive enclosures which have FW800 and USB3, for use on my late 2009 iMac11,1. Prior to purchase I wrote OWC and asked them if there were any sleep/wake issues. They informed me flat out that "those problems were fixed back in 2010" and that the drives they ship now have the newest chipsets which have no sleep/wake issues whatsoever. Well, I bought 2 enclosures and put 1TB spinning platter drives in them. One is a WD BLUE and the other is a stock Apple 1TB drive. In either case, when connected via FW800, the drives NEVER SLEEP, except when EJECTED. Sleeping the Mac or using a Terminal command to sleep externals in 1min. will not sleep either drive when using FW800. When using the USB connection, it is slow on my Mac because it only has USB2, but it does sleep as expected. However, as reported in this thread, it wakes quite often, and at times when it is NOT backing up to Time Machine. Strangely, it does this not long after I wake either the computer or merely wake the display. It spins up, then sleeps 1 min. later (as per my 1min. timer command in the Terminal), but then it will spin up a few minutes later, then sleep 1 min. after that, then spin up a few minutes later, then spin down 1 min. after that. After that, it seems to behave itself and remain asleep for a long time.

The really frustrating part is the FW800 connections though. That's why I bought these drives. I want to use that because it's faster on my older iMac11,1. And in the future, when I buy a new Mac, I can use USB at USB3 speeds. But since I do not wish to destroy my externals by leaving them spinning all the time, I am forced to use the USB connection.

Lastly, I'd like to add that OWC Tech Support asked me to Reset the SMC and PRAM, which I did, but it did not help at all.