I've been having some problems with a new external USB hard drive freezing the Finder when I try to copy a very large file (or group of files) to it. The copy will start out okay, but then freeze after some time. I think the problem is that the drive is spinning down (during the copy!) That seems very weird but really does seem like what is happening. I need to get to the bottom of this, or at least get a better solution in place, but for now I added this to my crontab:
*/5 * * * * ls /Volumes/BigMusic > /dev/null
and everything appears to be okay. What this does is query the external drive ("BigMusic") for a top level directory listing every 5 minutes (and then it sends the output of this query into oblivion, so I don't notice this is happening.) So there is no point to this command, but it just forces the drive to stay spun up by making the query every 5 minutes. That is a total hack though, so I'm not really happy with it, but at least I can copy files now.
That's weird behavior. Is it the drive I sent?
No, sorry, I haven't even gotten to that one yet. Yeah, it's weird. I just had it happen again, so this crazy fix isn't even a fix. Maybe it's a bad drive, although it doesn't seem to be.
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*/5 * * * * ls /Volumes/BigMusic > /dev/null
and everything appears to be okay. What this does is query the external drive ("BigMusic") for a top level directory listing every 5 minutes (and then it sends the output of this query into oblivion, so I don't notice this is happening.) So there is no point to this command, but it just forces the drive to stay spun up by making the query every 5 minutes. That is a total hack though, so I'm not really happy with it, but at least I can copy files now.
- jim 5-02-2007 7:31 pm
That's weird behavior. Is it the drive I sent?
- mark 5-03-2007 1:22 am
No, sorry, I haven't even gotten to that one yet. Yeah, it's weird. I just had it happen again, so this crazy fix isn't even a fix. Maybe it's a bad drive, although it doesn't seem to be.
- jim 5-03-2007 1:32 am