To get an idea of what processes are causing your drive to be accessed, you can open Activity Monitor in your Applications, Utilities folder and watch for processes to spike as the drive is accessed. option in System Preferences > Energy Saver."By most accounts, it is completely normal for a mounted external hard drive to be accessed several times per hour, even if the drive is not directly in use. However, there may be a way to control the frequency your computer accesses the external hard drive.Īpple Support Discussions user "Pondini" suggests: "Some drives respond to the Put the hard disk(s) to sleep. Can anything be done to completely make Time Machine forget that drive?" Possible work-aroundsĪs stated earlier, this does not appear to be an issue caused by a bug. I repeatedly hear the FireWire drive rev up each time this happens and its very distracting when working at my computer. When Time machine is backing up to it, it is understandable, but it "churns" even when Time machine is not using it, for example, when I simply save a file to my documents folder (I never save anything directly to my Time Machine drive) or sometimes for no reason at all."Apple Support Discussions user "Robert Weingarten" adds: "Although I have turned off Time Machine in the Preference panel, several times per hour TM keeps trying to access the external FireWire HD that it formerly used to do backups. I normally do not like to leave it on, because it "cycles." By that I mean, it will go to sleep, or "spin down," and then a few minutes later, for some reason it will wake back up again.
#WHY IS MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE READ ONLY ON MY MAC MAC#
I understand that it should stay on and connected to my Mac so that time machine can make its periodic backups.
![why is my seagate external hard drive read only on my mac why is my seagate external hard drive read only on my mac](http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/5338-2.jpg)
While this issue does not have a clear solution, most people agree that the disk access is normal and not a result of a bug.Īpple Support Discussions user "Timothy Arends1" writes: "I have an external LaCie FireWire hard drive that I use for Time machine.
![why is my seagate external hard drive read only on my mac why is my seagate external hard drive read only on my mac](https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/support-content/knowledge-base/images/DiskUtilityMSReserved.png)
Some Time Machine users are concerned that the drive was being accessed by another, unauthorized application or because of a bug. People have been noticing that their external hard drives continue to spin even when they have stopped using the drive.