External HDDs working furiously, but did not task them with anything?...

[jman995x]

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.

 

[MacInWin]

Could be indexing. I would suggest you open Activity Monitor and look at the Disk tab to see what process is either writing or reading lots of data. You can sort the bytes written and read columns by clicking on the header for the column to get the most busy ones to the top.

 

[IWT]

Looking at this from a different angle; if you don't want or need Spotlight to Index your External Hard Drive (EHD)s, you can stop the process quite easily.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > Then either Drag the EHD into the Privacy window - or click on the + sign and navigate to the attached EHD through Finder and add it that way.

Of course, you may have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting Spotlight to Index the EHDs.

Just a thought.

Ian

 

[iggibar]

How are the HDDs being used? Hard to answer the question without knowing what they are being used for.

 

[pigoo3]

Any chance the hard drives are doing back ups?

- Nick

 

[jman995x]

How are the HDDs being used? Hard to answer the question without knowing what they are being used for.

I have one for "Time Machine" backups, but don't have it set up to do that automatically (but, rather, do that manually when I feel like it, so that one is out (in terms of having a legitimate "process" it might be working on)).

And I have 2 others that I occasionally move files to from my iMac as secondary backups (also, manually).

While we're on the subject, maybe someone can also explain this to me....
Sometimes my EHD's will spin up in the middle the night when I, and my computer, are asleep...I haven't tasked them with anything, the computer itself isn't doing any updating...and mind you, this sometimes happens multiple times an hour, for hours on end...the EHD will spin up do some clattering...light up my room with whatever HDD cyborg light the manufacturer has put on the front of it to indicate to me that it is working...and then spin down and go to sleep after about 5 minutes or so.
Any idea why this happens, and so often?

 

[jman995x]

How are the HDDs being used? Hard to answer the question without knowing what they are being used for.

I literally 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.

 

[MacInWin]

Couple of suggestions:

1. Look for "md" or "mdworker" in the Activity Monitor. "md" is the process Spotlight uses for indexing drives.
2. Look at the "Disk" view in Activity monitor and sort by either "Bytes read" or "Bytes Written" to find the heavy hitter. The graph display will show a lot of reads if the drive is being indexed.

Your analogy to a blender is wrong in that it's more like you started the blender, dumped the stuff in to blend, then dumped it out and left the blender running. The md process starts as soon as the drive is connected, keeps going until it's finished and if you unmount the drive before it does finish, it starts again when reconnected. You can eliminate it from Spotlight searching in System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy page.

 

[MacInWin]

While we're on the subject, maybe someone can also explain this to me....
Sometimes my EHD's will spin up in the middle the night when I, and my computer, are asleep...I haven't tasked them with anything, the computer itself isn't doing any updating...and mind you, this sometimes happens multiple times an hour, for hours on end...the EHD will spin up do some clattering...light up my room with whatever HDD cyborg light the manufacturer has put on the front of it to indicate to me that it is working...and then spin down and go to sleep after about 5 minutes or so.
Any idea why this happens, and so often?

There are maintenance routines that the system completes during the night, if you leave the system powered up. These routines are good for the system, so you do want to let them run. Most of the work is to clean up scratch space and cache on the various hard drives, so that is what triggers them. If the light bothers you, put a bit of opaque tape over the LEDs. (Or move the computer to someplace where you are not going to be.)