Hard drive misbehaviour

Question

Level 1

38 points

Hard drive misbehaviour

Does anyone know why my hard drives keep spinning up and then going to sleep when I'm not even doing anything? Sometimes I sit at my computer for an hour or more reading the paper, and........

Or, when I'm typing in TextEdit, and have been for hours, and then I do a Search (not the first one, either), and for that it spins up BOTH hard drives..?! I could *almost* see it spinning up my startup drive (if I hadn't already does a search and if TextEdit and/or OSX 10.4 was written by idiots), but my second hdd..?? W-Th-F?!!?

Nor can you control how long before it puts them to sleep in the first place: the Energy Saver panel only has a dummybox for "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible." Not that it would matter, because sometimes after putting them to sleep, it spins them back up within seconds. Again, this is WHEN I'M NOT EVEN DOING ANYTHING. Similar aggravating, hackjob OS behaviour does not happen on my Windows XP computer.



PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11), G4; G5; Dual-Core iMac.

Posted on Dec 1, 2013 9:21 PM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,225 points

Dec 1, 2013 10:01 PM in response to paulpen

Open Console in Applications>Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

What all is in Sporlight's Pref Pane's Privacy tab?

I could *almost* see it spinning up my startup drive (if I hadn't already does a search and if TextEdit and/or OSX 10.4 was written by idiots)

I doubt you want to engage the tards that wrote any later OS then, IMHO, 10.4.11 was the apex for OSX... went downhill ever after. 😟

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Answer 2

paulpen Author

Level 1

38 points

Dec 11, 2013 9:10 PM in response to BDAqua

Console mostly shows garbage like "Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame..." but it's very long and practically unreadable and therefore useless.

Spotlight's Privacy tab has my 12GB hard drive so that isn't indexed, but not my startup drive.

This is driving me crazy. It's obscene. It just spun up both hard drives a few min ago for no reason whatsoever which is why i am finally back here posting again.


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Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

411,223 points

Dec 12, 2013 7:08 AM in response to paulpen

I am running OSX 10.4.11 and frankly I don't hear my drives change their spinning. It may have something to do with your preferences settings or other software you run. Anyway, while not spinning the drives saves energy I thought it was best to keep drives spinning because it's the starting and stopping that's hard on them. I have some drives in my G4 that are at least 8 years old and have been spinning all the time since I usually leave my computer on 24/7 unless I am away overnight.

You'll have to find somebody whose idea of a fun time is running Terminal and watching system processes come and go to see what's triggering this.

How old are these drives? Don't some newer "green" drives have their own energy saving featues built in that may control rotation?

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Answer 4

rccharles

Level 6

12,957 points

Dec 12, 2013 11:24 AM in response to paulpen

It's hard to figure out i/o activity with disks. How much effort do you want to put into this?

I seem to recall the information for what files not to search is divided among your disks. So, when you do a Spotlight search, each of your disks will be accessed.

Try spotless app to turn off seach.

I have run across terminal commands to set sleep time.

Robert

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