Programs keep waiting for external disk to spin up - how to ignore disk?

Posted by Andrew J. Brehm on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Andrew J. Brehm
Published on 2010-06-18T14:09:19Z Indexed on 2010/06/18 14:14 UTC
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Filed under:

mac

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external-harddrive

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time-machine

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firewire

Like many Mac users I have an external Firewire disk hooked up to my Mac to be used by Time Machine. This works very well, backup-wise.

The problem is that very often when I use a Mac application and try to open a file, the file selection dialogue window hangs until the external disk has spun up. I never ever want to open a file on the external disk. Sometimes this happens even when I just want to save a file I already saved (i.e. type something and press meta-s).

Is there anything I can do about this?

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