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From: thepixelfreak on 23 Sep 2009 14:50

SBBOD = Spinning Beach Ball of Death

Could someone who understands MacOS X internals please explain to me
why the finder needs to wait for an external Firewire drive to spin up
to:

1. Open an app from the doc. (sbbod until the FW drive spins up)
2. Quit an app via right clicking the dock icon of the app. (shows
'Application not Responding' until FW drive spins up then
'quit' is the available choice)
3. Get a running program to respond. (sbbod then app responds as usual
when FW drive spins up)

Let me set the scene. I do not have 'put drives to sleep' in energy
saver. Spotlight is configured to ignore all of my external volumes.
None of my apps use the external volumes for scratch or anything else.
I rarely if ever directly save to an external volume from any
application. I cannot change the behavior of the FW drive going into
Stand-By mode (I've checked with Seagate and the feature is not
changeable via firmware or dip-switch/jumper settings)

My only thought is poor filesystem buffer cache management. Problem is
even that doesn't make sense. If I haven't read from or written to the
external drives there shouldn't be ANY in memory buffers associated
with the now in stand-by state firewire drive.

The SBBOD usually only takes 5-10 seconds to go away and Finder
behavior to return to normal. I know it sounds 'petty' but it
definitely is a flaw in what is supposed to be (and usually is) a very
responsive GUI. I've experienced this annoying behavior with the
standard Apple apps (Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes etc) and my 3rd
party apps (Photoshop CS3, Excel, Word, Cisco VPN client. I'm thinking
about writing a crontab entry to 'touch' the FW drive every few minutes
to keep it spun up as a workaround.

Running 10.6.1 and hoping Apple would have gotten it right with this release.

--

thepixelfreak

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