Stop External Drives Slowing Down OS X (& Quicksilver)
Thursday, July 19th, 2007I 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).