Drive scan every 10 minutes

[tomhukk]

@nikolas, in the link you posted, there's this:

The command to work with the optical drive is drutil :
drutil -drive [drive-arguments] command [command-options-and-arguments]

Under commands, there's this:
poll Constantly polls and displays device notifications.

Could this be it? What are the settings for poll? If we could turn polling off or just set the interval for much longer (less annoying), then would that fix it? How do we do that?

 

[nickolasemp]

Will look into that. I know for a fact that in Linux the cdrom drive is actually a hard link to /dev/cdrom. Therefore it behaves sort of like a drive (well, the mounting options are different but that is another story).

Here's hoping for tomorrow's digging...

 

[tomhukk]

Okay, so I found this page:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ ... til.1.html

It seems that polling just displays the drive information. I read in another post that there's a python script which is causing the drive information to come up (i.e. it's probably running the polling command). If we could find that script, maybe we could change it. Where are the python scripts stored in OSX? How can I narrow down what script is doing what?

See the second post here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1828824?start=0&tstart=0

 

[nickolasemp]

In Ubuntu we could do

hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom

. Let's try to find out what we can do in OSX

 

[nickolasemp]

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?

The Volume of a drive is either the newly created folder in /Volumes once you pop in a cd or the disk link that comes up when you insert a cd in /dev

Python scripts run natively in Lion. Just create one for yourself and then you can run it from terminal using 'python /path/to/script'

Edit---
I am now reading http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?s ... 3235221135 on how to disable entirely a drive. I know this is not good, but perhaps it is a start.

 

[tomhukk]

In Ubuntu we could do

hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom

. Let's try to find out what we can do in OSX

I'm up for giving it a try tonight when I get home. Do I just type that code into the terminal? I'm a bit of a noob but would like to get to the bottom of this, because so many people are having this problem and there are no fixes out there. Let me know what I should do.

 

[nickolasemp]

In Ubuntu we could do

hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom

. Let's try to find out what we can do in OSX

I'm up for giving it a try tonight when I get home. Do I just type that code into the terminal? I'm a bit of a noob but would like to get to the bottom of this, because so many people are having this problem and there are no fixes out there. Let me know what I should do.

Well, if it was linux yes. But OSX works differently. So, the answer is no. I would be grateful if you could send me the link where you saw that one can change the interval of polling drives. Perhaps we could change it that way.
Take care.

 

[tomhukk]

I didn't see how to change the polling interval in code. I've only seen it here as part of a GUI for SpindownHD (apple development tools):
http://lowendmac.com/musings/06/0217.html

The most promising app (Keep Drive Spinning) is detailed in this article:
http://www.applesprite.com/blog/2010/02 ... -sleeping/

Here, you can specify your drive and set the interval for polling. However, I don't know how to set it for an empty CD drive, only a volume. If we could figure out that, then we could enable sleep for all of the drives except the CD drive.

here are some other apps:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31158/ ... e-spinning

 

[nickolasemp]

well you could put inside a cd and then run the program but I don;t think it works after you remove the cd from the drive.

I used

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice.kext

Beside the errors, now the drive doesn't spin...nor does it work!

 

[tomhukk]

Damn. I'm starting to think that this is an issue that can only be fixed with a firmware update. I've searched and searched, and I can't find the source of the issue in OSX.