I seem to be suffering from spin-up lag. I have a Maxtor One Touch 500GB external hard drive connected to my 24-inch iMac. I use it mostly for storage, keeping only the bare minimum on my iMac’s boot volume. But when I open a Finder window or launch an application, there’s a lag where nothing happens and I can hear the disk spinning up even if it doesn’t seem like it needs to.
Could the problem be the way it’s formatted, as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)? Is it the journaling? I also unchecked “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” in System Preferences > Energy Saver but that didn’t help. I’ve started ejecting the drive when I’m not using it and remounting it with Disk Utility when it’s needed, but this is a bit of a pain.
Journaling is just a way for the file system to keep track of any pending write operations, in case the power fails. It saves OS X from having to run a block-by-block check of the whole disk to restore file system integrity after a crash at the expense of a performance hit that is trivial for all but the largest, busiest drives. It has nothing to do with the spin-up delay you’re seeing.
Your USB drive won’t necessarily respect the Energy Saver settings.
No, this is just your Maxtor drive going to sleep by itself. External disks—and USB devices in general—don’t always pay any attention to the Energy Saver settings and just sleep themselves based on how recently they were last accessed. If the drive is mounted, then OS X will ping it briefly when a new Finder window is opened, just to make sure that it should still appear in the Devices list. That will startle the drive out of its doze, and it’ll send a panicked “hang on!” message back, while it hops around on the floor, trying to get its jeans back on.
I don’t really know why you want everything off your internal disk. If everything fits, I would recommend keeping it all internal and then using the Maxtor as a backup disk. But if you really want to subdivide your data like this, you either need to use the Maxtor disk more than you do now, or less. If you put more frequently accessed data on it, you’ll stop it from sleeping so readily. Alternatively, if you access it less frequently, the spin-up lag won’t be so annoying.
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jimmosk
June 19, 2012 at 12:00pm
This is a notorious problem that Maxtor/Seagate external HD owners are complaining about on countless forums. The Windows version of the Maxtor drive utility software does have the ability to change the default spin-down time from the godawful 60-second default, but not the Mac version.
However, I emailed Maxtor/Seagate tech support, and they quickly sent me a pkg that made the change for me. I wasn't able to select the sleep period; it just changed the drive to 'never sleep', but I think that's significantly better that experiencing a 15-second beachball every few minutes!
