HDD as second drive not spinning down

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Having a problem that any options listed in this and other forums that I searched has yet to fix..

I have added an SSD to my Mid 2010 Macbook Pro in place of the Optical drive. I am running the most up to date OSX Mountain Lion there is as well. The problem I am having is my Original drive, which is now my secondary Hard Drive for Pictures only, stays spinning... 24/7 if I leave my Macbook on. This ultimately causes more battery drain. Even if I eject the drive, a few moments later it spins up again but doesn't mount.

I have tried adding the second drive, called Media Drive, to the spotlight Indexing Privacy tab but it appears that spotlight is still searching that drive every few seconds causing it to spin up.

It's a Seagate Momentous XT 500GB drive if that matters and the option to sleep the drive when possible is activated.

Any help would be appreciated.
 

chscag

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Try disabling Spotlight altogether. Chances are you're not using it anyway:

Disable Spotlight from the terminal.

The primary method is using launchctl, this will require the administrative password:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Let us know if that works for you.
 
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Try disabling Spotlight altogether. Chances are you're not using it anyway:

Disable Spotlight from the terminal.

The primary method is using launchctl, this will require the administrative password:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Let us know if that works for you.

Ok so I gave that a try and my HDD did not stop, even when I unmounted the drive it kept spinning. I remembered that I have bootcamp on there as well and so I ejected that one too. Drive went silent.... Ok, 1...2....3....4....looking good...10...11...12... great I went past the 10 seconds! ...20 seconds HDD spins up.... Grrrrrrr! It's not getting mounted again either, just spinning away for no reason..

So I do use Spotlight regularly so how do I now turn it back on? :) (Edit: I figured it out... load instead of unload... seems simple but for a non coder like me this is a big step:) )

It looks to me like I'm just going to have to live with a spinning HDD forever....or until I buy a larger capacity SSD.

Unless anyone else has any options that is? Thanks for trying Chscag!
 

chscag

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A quick point here.... If by killing Spotlight, it didn't get the hard drive to stop spinning after so many seconds, it's likely a firmware problem with the Seagate Momentus. You might want to access the Seagate knowledge base and see if you can find a solution there or contact Seagate support to see if they have a clue.
 
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I have also tried removing the seagate drive and using the Hitachi drive that came with the Macbook and it also would not spin down (It was much much quieter than the Seagate but still is spinning) so this makes me think this is not a firmware problem with the Seagate...Good thought though... :(

I did Run the following script "sudo lsof |grep /Volumes/Mediadrive" which told me that even when spotlight disabled, that the Finder was still accessing the drive.

"Finder 168 jesseabernethy 26r DIR 1,6 136 20602
/Volumes/Mediadrive/.Trashes/503"

.. Is there a way to block that from accessing it unless I am looking for the drive?
 

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