Stop External Drives Slowing Down OS X (& Quicksilver)
I have an external FireWire drive & use ChronoSync to automatically sync/backup my whole Home/User folder to it every night (So don’t use the FireWire drive in the day).
But when I use the Copy To.. & Move To.. actions in Quicksilver (I use them all the time) the drive almost always slows the computer down by spinning up. Same when saving & opening files in OS X. When the Open/Save dialogue windows open up there’ll usually be a delay while the FireWire dive spins up.
I saw a handy workaround over at macosxhints. Someone posted some code to use in Terminal to mount & unmount FireWire drives. I don’t use Terminal so turned them into Automator applications & then set them to run automatically through iCal.
So every night it will automatically mount my FireWire HD & ChronoSync will automatically sync my home folder to the FireWire HD.
Then it will automatically unmount the drive in the the morning so that it doesn’t slow down Quicksilver, & the Save & Open dialogue windows throughout the day.
If you want to try it out it’s really easy to do. You can download the Automator workflow apps along with the instructions from here. (Also has USB drive versions).
(You could just run them manually instead of through iCal if you wanted).
Automator
iCal
Quicksilver
ChronoSync
Tags: automator, firewire, mac, productivity, quicksilver, usb
November 10th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
hello…this is great idea but my question is there a way to tell it which drive to mount and which ones not to mount…because i have different drives for different things…can you make one that will tell it say…
mount firewire hard drives…if named “External 300C” if not named “External 300C” unmount it..i dont know what to say…i would like certain drives to be on at certain times of the day type thing…is that even possible or does this just work for any and all drives connect thru FW or USB?
thank you
alex
now4real954@aol.com
November 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I wouldn’t know how to do that. It might be possible with some AppleScript. You could try posting this question at Apple’s AppleScript Forums. Some bright spark might be able to help you out.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am
good idea but it did not work on my imac 10,4,11 I see it is PPc Is it compatible with intel?
November 12th, 2008 at 1:21 am
They’re just Automator workflows saved as apps. Work fine on my Intel & PPC machines. You could try opening them up in Automator & resaving them.
March 13th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Hi, I went here looking for something to mount/unmount my FW HDD but this scripts is not working on Snow, do you have some update for this? it will be appreciated. Thx!
March 16th, 2010 at 2:54 am
I’ve tried it with some FireWire 800 drives I have under Snow Leopard and it worked fine.
Maybe you could open them up in Automator or Script Editor and try running them from there, or re-saving them?