LaCie P2 Drive Always Blinking - Always Being Accessed

Question

Level 1

4 points

LaCie P2 Drive Always Blinking - Always Being Accessed

So I got the LaCie P2 Professional Drive for a backup drive. When I move files over, of course, I expect the light to blink, but even after the files are done transferring, the light continues to blink. I reformat the harddrive, and transfer one file at a time. Same thing. Once a file is transferred, the drive continues to blink even hours after I move a file. I've tried restarting the Mac, I eject the P2 drive and plug it back in (it starts blinking and continues to blink), basically, if there's a file on the drive, it's blinking forever.

What's accessing files all time? Is something wrong? What can I do to make the blinking stop?

MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)

Posted on Jul 27, 2023 7:36 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

a brody

Level 10

85,314 points

Jul 27, 2023 8:23 PM in response to reesa160

Spotlight.

Spotlight is the indexing function of Mac OS that looks for the content of all data on all mounted volumes.

If you go to the Spotlight System Preferences/Settings you can add the LaCie drive to the Privacy part of Spotlight This will limit finding files on the external drive, and content.

Unless you are really big on content search, and just need to be able to search what is being backed up, https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware has a software called EasyFind that can locate files by name or date.

Time Machine backup itself can be manually operated when the settings are set to have its icon in the menubar. From there you can start and stop Time Machine, thus saving wear and tear on the drive. Also you generally don't want to be running a backup except after saving new changes to important documents or before installing new software. Doing an automatic backup all the time can slow you down.

Reply

LaCie P2 Drive Always Blinking - Always Being Accessed

Similar questions