My LaCie FW 512 GB HD won't STFU

May 12, 2005 12:22 PM

I use a LaCie 500 GB firewire hard drive for backing up my files and running my iTunes library on it (I'm running OS 10.4 - Tiger). Even when I don't use it, it continues to make noise like it's still spinning. What gives? Is this an indication that something is wrong?

I have my iTunes closed, and I'm not using any files on the LaCie yet, it keeps making noise like it's very engaged. I have done disk repair and everything, yet it's still making noise. Any idea how to remedy this? My googlefu yields precious little. Thanks!

posted by psmealey to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Best answer: If you have Spotlight enabled, it may be scanning and indexing the contents of the drive.

In the Spotlight system preferences panel, you can tell it to NOT scan/index that drive.
posted by mrbill at 12:28 PM on May 12, 2005

mine does that same noise occasionally, and it works
posted by matteo at 12:29 PM on May 12, 2005

Best answer: Also, you can completely block Spotlight from doing anything on the drive by doing the following (I've found it works better than the Control Panel option):

(turn off indexing)
$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/DRIVENAME

(delete indexes already on drive)
$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/DRIVENAME
posted by mrbill at 12:30 PM on May 12, 2005

If there isn't a little flashing dot in the middle of the spotlight magnifying glass, it's not indexing and you have something else to blame.
posted by smackfu at 12:43 PM on May 12, 2005

Response by poster: Smackfu, I hadn't notice the flashing dot there, but I took mrbill's advice and the problem immediately went away. Could just be a coincidence, but we shall see. Thanks, all!
posted by psmealey at 12:46 PM on May 12, 2005

Are you sure it's not just an internal cooling fan in the drive? Has the drive always done this, or did it just start when you installed Tiger?
posted by alms at 1:35 PM on May 12, 2005

As a side note: Spotlight sucks. What horrible execution.
posted by xmutex at 2:08 PM on May 12, 2005

xmutex: I politely disagree. I love it. Very helpful.
posted by papercake at 2:28 PM on May 12, 2005

My LaCie 160 makes noise even when I'm not accessing it. After a certain time period (I've never timed it) it shuts itself down and is quiet. If I umount the drive the sound ceases instantaneously.

If you unmount yours, what happens?
posted by dobbs at 3:49 PM on May 12, 2005

Also, psmealey, if you don't mind me asking, did you get a good price on the 500 and if so, from where? I'm thinking of upgrading. Thanks!
posted by dobbs at 3:51 PM on May 12, 2005

Response by poster: dobbs, before I "hid" the LaCie from Spotlight, if I unmounted the drive it would go silent, but as soon as engaged it again, it would demonstrate the same behavior. Didn't sound like cooling fan at all, it definitely sounded like the disk spinning. The reason I got a bit worried is that I had another LaCie disk (the 175 GB model) hard crash on me a while back (unrecoverable: very, very bad), and it pretty much showed the same behavior that I described earlier today. At any rate, I did what mrbill said, and it its disk is now spinning only when I'm using it.

At any rate, I picked it up on eBay (new) a while back for about $325, if memory serves.
posted by psmealey at 5:27 PM on May 12, 2005

xmutex, I think it's really that mdimport, the indexing part of Spotlight, has some bugs in it. I had Tiger running successfully on two machines for about 8 days before mdimport decided to start hammering the CPU on my work 800MHz iMac--for about 48 hours straight! I finally killed the process, and the machine's been fine since then. I don't specifically know that this has been addressed in the supposedly forthcoming 10.4.1, but I'm guessing it probably has.
posted by kimota at 5:43 PM on May 12, 2005

As an aside, I think all hard drives are always spinning all the time, whether they're reading data or not, so you'll always hear a slight noise. The actual 'chugging-away' noise when you access the disk is the read-write heads moving around.

You can tell Mac OS X to completely shut down hard drives while they're not in use. Go to

System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Custom -> Sleep

and tick "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible."
posted by chrismear at 12:53 AM on May 13, 2005