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.
