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External HDDs working furiously, even though I haven't tasked them with anything?

J

jman995x

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 8, 2007
199
3
Was just curious if anybody knew why my external HDDs would be chattering away on "some task" when I haven't given them anything to do in 12 hours.
The only thing I can think of is that Spotlight is Indexing them, but other than that can't think of a reason why some of them would be sounding like I'm transferring Terabytes of information, when, as I said, I haven't given them anything to do in at least 12 hours.
 
You could test your indexing theory by disabling spotlight on the drives and see if that helps.
(system prefs > spotlight > privacy tab > drag in disks)
To re-enable, just remove them from the Privacy list.
 
I literally just use this particular Ext. HDD to store thousands of photos from my travels with my GF (for safe keeping).
I turn the disk on about once a month, transfer over the photos from that month, then turn it off.

However, there are times when I'll mount it to grab a photo, and then won't need it for anything else. Or, I'll search for a photo name, find it, but then leave the finder window open and go do something else.
Meanwhile, the thing will whir and R/W, CONSTANTLY, for HOURS...and I haven't asked it to do ANYTHING.

Imagine you plug in your blender to make a smoothie.
You make the smoothie...takes all of about a minute.
You turn the blender off (ie: you're not using it anymore).
You leave your blender plugged in.
The blender turns itself on and runs for HOURS, without you touching it, or pressing any buttons.

It's annoying to hear this thing "crunching" whatever it is doing like the "WOPR" computer in the movie "War Games".

If Spotlight IS indexing it, it would be nice if there were a simple way to find out / something in Activity Monitor that would show/tell what certain Ext. HDD's are working on.
 
You could test your indexing theory by disabling spotlight on the drives and see if that helps.
(system prefs > spotlight > privacy tab > drag in disks)
To re-enable, just remove them from the Privacy list.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
jman995x said:
If Spotlight IS indexing it, it would be nice if there were a simple way to find out / something in Activity Monitor that would show/tell what certain Ext. HDD's are working on.
Click to expand...
If the drive is NOT listed in Spotlight's Privacy / Exclusion list, then it's possible, maybe even likely, that Spotlight is indeed indexing the contents.

I don't know of anything in particular that will definitely say, "Yes, the disk X is being indexed right now". That's mainly because Spotlight's indexing is done with mdworker tasks, which are subprocesses that get run as needed. Those can terminate (exit) for several reasons, such as completing their task, hitting fatal errors, or I'm not even sure what else. One can sometimes see various mdworker's in Activity Monitor, but it can be hard to tell where they're working, partly because they can be ephemeral and terminate by the time you get a chance to look at where they're working.

The simplest test I can think of is to follow barbu's suggestion and add your disk to Spotlight's Privacy list. You'll need to do this while it's mounted. If that solves the problem, then it was definitely Spotlight indexing.

There are also Terminal commands to control Spotlight indexing, but they'll need the drive mounted, too. If you're into Terminal commands, read man mdutil.
 
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