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Disk mounting / unmounting tool

S

smellalot

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 6, 2011
277
2
I'm looking for a little tool that sits in the menu bar to unmount / mount my internal HDD so my Mac can be nice and silent.

I googled but the two tools I tried did not work. Does anybody know a good tool that unmounts the drive and actually makes it stop spinning and then gives you the option to mount that drive again?
 
smellalot said:
I'm looking for a little tool that sits in the menu bar to unmount / mount my internal HDD so my Mac can be nice and silent.

I googled but the two tools I tried did not work. Does anybody know a good tool that unmounts the drive and actually makes it stop spinning and then gives you the option to mount that drive again?
Click to expand...

Are you talking about your primary HD with your boot partition? If so, you can't.

Get yourself an SSD and not only will it be silent, you'll see massive performance gains.
 
SlCKB0Y said:
Are you talking about your primary HD with your boot partition? If so, you can't.

Get yourself an SSD and not only will it be silent, you'll see massive performance gains.
Click to expand...

Look at my signature.

Edit: Thank you still. , Didn't want to sound rude.
 
Last edited:
smellalot said:
Look at my signature.
Click to expand...

Didn't notice that!

What applications did you try? Was the problem when mounting, unmounting, or both? Did the application report any errors to you?

Any application you are trying to use will probably be using either mount/umount or diskutil from the command line.

Maybe manually run one of these commands and see if it still fails and if so, you might get some more info as to why.

The most common reason for umount failing is that a file on the partition being unmounted is still in use.
 
SlCKB0Y said:
Didn't notice that!

What applications did you try? Was the problem when mounting, unmounting, or both? Did the application report any errors to you?

Any application you are trying to use will probably be using either mount/umount or diskutil from the command line.

Maybe manually run one of these commands and see if it still fails and if so, you might get some more info as to why.

The most common reason for umount failing is that a file on the partition being unmounted is still in use.
Click to expand...

I tried Free Space Tab, which unmounts the drive fine and spins it down immediately. But it can't mount drives so I'd still need to go to disk utility for that.

Semulov is another tool I tried. It unmounts the drive but the disk keeps spinning. On the other hand it shows unmounted drives.

None of the tools gave me an error. But I was hoping someone knows an app that combines the good feature of these two ;)
 
Back in the days of the Classic Mac OS, there was a very nifty tool called "SCSI Probe" which would scan the SCSI bus and mount drives that it found.

Too bad there is no modern-day equivalent with which to "probe" the USB and firewire buses to do the same thing...
 
i use applescript with alfred :
Code: 
 set myVolumeLabel to "OptiBay"

tell application "Finder"
	set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[0-9]*' "
	if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
		do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
	else
		do shell script "diskutil unmountDisk " & diskDev
	end if
end tell
 
misko said:
i use applescript with alfred :
Code: 
 set myVolumeLabel to "OptiBay"

tell application "Finder"
	set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[0-9]*' "
	if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
		do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
	else
		do shell script "diskutil unmountDisk " & diskDev
	end if
end tell
Click to expand...

OK, thank you for your help. Unfortunately my disk keeps spinning. I tried to modify your script by using the record feature of apple script editor. I recorded the CMD+E command in Finder and replaced the unmount routine in your script. Unfortunately it doesn't work. Do you have an idea why? Here's my script:

Code: 
set myVolumeLabel to "HDD"

tell application "Finder"
	set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[0-9]*' "
	if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
		do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
	else
		tell application "Finder"
			activate
			eject disk myVolumeLabel
		end tell
	end if
end tell


Any help will be greatly appreciated since I really like my Mac quiet!
 
I found it! For anyone else having this problem:

Use the command eject instead of unmountDisk. See the correct code below.

Code: 
set myVolumeLabel to "HDD"

tell application "Finder"
	set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[0-9]*' "
	if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
		do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
	else
		do shell script "diskutil eject " & diskDev
	end if
end tell
 
For me on MBP 13" 2011 work ok with "diskutil unmountDisk" but You found solution for your problem - It is important. Sorry for my bad English :)
 
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