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Drive scan every 10 minutes

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nickolasemp

nickolasemp

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I know this ius not a big deal, but I would like it not to happen.

Once logged in Lion, every 10 minutes or so I can hear the optical drive checking to see if there is a disc in the tray. Can I stop that? If I do, will it mean anything to the OS?

Thank you in advance for your time.
 
An LG one (Bluray writer). Is there a way to fix that besides the fact of replacing it?
 
Ok thanks! :banghead:
 
I have an LG blu-ray as well. It does the same scanning thing. There are only two fixes:

1. Go into preferences-->energy saver and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". When this is unchecked, OSX won't poll your drive trying to shut it down or wake it up (I'm not sure what it's trying to do with optical drives).

2. Leave a CD in the drive. (I guess this tells OSX not to try to sleep your drive or something, and that's why it doesn't poll it).

I think we should work on an actual fix. I feel like it's fixable with a little effort. Somehow we can either tell mac to not poll the optical drive (while letting it poll the other drives), or we can tell it that there's always a CD in the drive. I don't know. There has to be a preference setting somewhere, or some way to preferentially change which drive it polls and at what interval.

Does anyone know where I should start in hunting down the source of this problem?
 
tomhukk said:
1. Go into preferences-->energy saver and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". When this is unchecked, OSX won't poll your drive trying to shut it down or wake it up (I'm not sure what it's trying to do with optical drives).
........
Does anyone know where I should start in hunting down the source of this problem?
Click to expand...

Thank you for that answer. I wish there was some sort of plist that we could change.
 
I think there is a way to globally change the time before OSX spins down idle drives.

in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

You'll see the line:
<key>Disk Sleep Timer</key>
<integer>10</integer>

Set the integer to the number of minutes before OSX sleeps all drives ("0" means never). So, I'm guessing if you set it for 30min, then your optical drive will be polled every thirty minutes which isn't so bad, and still allows your drives to sleep after 30min of inactivity.

I really wish there was a way to access how OSX is polling the optical drive. Where is that command coming from? How do you set the time on that? This .plist must be triggering some sort of command.
 
See here.

So OSX doesn't separate hdds from optical drives? So much for being a smart OS. I remember having the same problem in Ubuntu and I don't remember how I got it right. I am searching to find out how (hoping that since they both share a Unix background, they will have similar functions).

Just quickly, here is the manual of drutil
 
Thanks nickolasemp! If you were able to sort it out in Ubuntu, then maybe there's hope.

I have read that there are applications for Mac that allow you to choose a drive and individually assign the time interval to spin down. But that may be a polling script. The problem with those applications is that you assign the time to a volume and not a drive. What is the volume of an empty DVD drive? How do you assign intervals to a device that is volumeless? I'm not sure how that works. Do you need a partition to have a volume or is there a way of specifying the drive itself? If so, then maybe there is some hope, since you can turn off "Put hard disk(s) to sleep" (i.e. turn off global polling) while assigning separate polling to each drive/device.
 
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