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What would be waking my externals up all the time?

T

TraceyS/FL

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jan 11, 2007
4,175
316
North Central Florida
All the energy settings are default Lion, as it shipped.

If i let the mini go to sleep on its own - every so often I hear my external hard drives "wake up" (FW400 drives, 1 my book, 1 seagate - & i think it is happening more with the MyBook). Since the computer is in my room, and I have sick kids waking up all night - i hear them often. It *seems* to also do it when I get on my iPad. But, i'm not coherent enough in the middle of the night to sort this out ;)

If i go up and select "sleep" from the apple menu, it doesn't happen.

Network is wifi, I have an airport in here extending from my TimeCapsule. I don't think "wake on LAN" got enabled anywhere. I run a regular account for myself with a master Admin account.

It's obviously NOT the end of the world - but it is annoying and my MBP with the same drives didn't do it.
 
Time Machine backups will spin up a sleeping machine. Default is every hour.
 
I just turned "wake for network traffic" off for now - i shall see if it was that in conjunction with the iPad/iPhone use.

Of course, i'd rather NOT have the insomnia that has me noticing it - or the sick kids waking me up!
 
TraceyS/FL said:
I just turned "wake for network traffic" off for now - i shall see if it was that in conjunction with the iPad/iPhone use.

Of course, i'd rather NOT have the insomnia that has me noticing it - or the sick kids waking me up!
Click to expand...

Let us know how it goes. Hopefully it'll fix the issue.

I don't usually have trouble sleeping, but when my hard drives spin up while I'm trying to fall asleep the noise also keeps me up for a bit longer.

If you're in the market for a new drive ever, the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drives are super quiet. It barely makes any noise.
 
This "problem" has been aground for a long time.

I have a 2010 Mac Mini Server with 2 external drives attached (USB3 and Firewire 800). My current OS is a clean 10.7.3 install with the "put hard drives to sleep" option enabled in system preferences.

My mini is on all the time (no sleep), it doesn't have TimeMachine configured (I don't use it). Spotlight for those drives is off and still on a some random moments (when the mini is idle) the drives spin up from time to time.

It has been like this for 10.6.2 till now so I guess the OS needs to "re-detect" the drives from time to time.
 
It's done it twice in the last 15 minutes, just now when I launched safari on my iPad.

At least I'm not imagining it happening! I will just have to remember to put it to sleep manually when I go to bed.
 
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