External HD Slow To Wake

[Tomaburque]

Long time Windows guy made the switch to Mac less than a year ago. Mac Mini i7, SSD 16 gigs. The external 2 terabyte USB 2 Fantom harddrive gets heavy daily use. I use a Eye TV tuner dongle with DVR software to record TV programs and I also download TV programs almost daily. The Fantom goes to sleep after 15 minutes of non use. Used to be it would wake right up but that has gradually gotten slower and it's up to a minute or two now. This causes problems because the Eye TV software for some reason needs to access the HD before it will shut down and this is causing shutdown to fail. It also adds almost 2 minutes to boot up where the machine boots in 14 seconds flat without the HD attached. As a Windows guy I would say the drive must be horribly fragmented and I would de-frag. But I've read that Macs don't need de-fragmentation and I see no de-frag utility under apps/utility. Once the drive wakes up it works fine.

Any advice on how to fix my slow to wake up external harddrive would be appreciated.

Tom in Albuquerque

 

[Just_Me_D]

I've never experienced anything like that, but then again, I've never used a 2 terabyteUSB drive with my Mac either......If you're still experiencing the problem mentioned in your original post, hopefully, someone with a similar set up can be of assistance to you soon...