Shut off External Drive right?

[Buzz-On]

Hi! Just got Lacie Minimus 2 TB. When I unmount it (eject disk) the Minimus continues to spin. My old external drives usually would stop spinning once ejected; I would then wait until they spun down completely before flipping off their power switches.

With my new Minimus, like I said, it just keeps going, and eventually I just flip off it's power switch. It makes a slight squeak noise, which sounds abrupt to me, and then winds down of course.

Just wanted to make sure this was normal and wasn't hurting my external drive, since it's so different from how my olds ones would power down (they were iomegas).

I'm using Lion on an iMac. Also, I just backed up hundreds of Gigabytes to this new drive if that means anything. I checked out system monitor and couldn't see if spotlight was indexing or anything like that, but I've heard that spotlight indexing will sometimes result in a message saying that the disk is in use and cannot be ejected. I am NOT getting this message.

Thanks so much,

-Kelly

 

[chscag]

Moved to the proper forum. Not really a "Switcher" topic.

To answer your question.... External drives that are powered via the mains (AC) will usually continue to spin until the power switch is turned off. I have several drives of various makes that are AC powered and they do the same exact thing. It will not corrupt data as long as the drive is not accessing the data at the time.

USB and Firewire drives spin down when ejected because power is removed at the same time.

 

[Buzz-On]

Great! Thanks so much!