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coffeym

macrumors member
Original poster
May 16, 2016
61
169
UK
My WD 2TB USB3 My Passport Ultra (powered only by USB) keeps blinking on macOS Sierra, including on today's 10.12.1 update. I've confirmed that this happens on my iMac and MacBook Pro, but does not happen under El Capitan. It would appear that the device is being written to, and is never allowed to go to sleep. The hard drive makes writing noises.

I've made sure it is set as an exception in Spotlight, so it is not being indexed. Other WD drives aren't affected in this way and go to sleep normally. I've run First Aid, with no faults found and no changes to the behaviour.

Anybody have any ideas? I've checked in Activity Monitor and can't see any processes that could be causing this. It's clearly a Sierra problem, but it's pretty much a deal breaker as the writing noise is too annoying to have to put up with all day.
 

comics addict

macrumors 6502a
Feb 16, 2013
624
40
I have the 1tb model of your drive and i never have had problems with it running in El Capitan as well as Sierra. It does what you describe, even after being ejected, but all my WD drives have done so when I have encrypted them with FileVault. Do you have that particular drive encrypted by any chance? I never had it like that when I'm using wd own a encryption method.
 

coffeym

macrumors member
Original poster
May 16, 2016
61
169
UK
I have the 1tb model of your drive and i never have had problems with it running in El Capitan as well as Sierra. It does what you describe, even after being ejected, but all my WD drives have done so when I have encrypted them with FileVault. Do you have that particular drive encrypted by any chance? I never had it like that when I'm using wd own a encryption method.

Afraid not. The issue doesn't happen when using a safe boot. Such a frustrating problem!
 
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