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One of the tweaks in Snow Leopard that I really like is the way my external drive, used only for Time Machine backups, stays suspended unless a Time Machine backup is in progress.

Previously under Leopard, my external drive would spin up randomly which I found very annoying.

I am now deaing with an annoying bug. Anytime I try to save a document, in Pages or Word or anything, the save dialog hangs for a a moment while my external drive wakes up. Once it is awake, I am able to chose a save destination.

Is it possible to prevent this behavior? I'd like to exclude my external drive as a place to save documents.

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It sounds like the Finder is waiting on the drive. Open a new finder window with the sidebar open, and drag the drive in question out of the sidebar. That should prevent it from being requested & thus being spun up.

You can still tranverse over to it, by going to the computer level, and selecting the drive from there...

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I've tried that and it doesn't stop Word from waiting for a bit and then waking up my external drive before allowing me to save. The only way to stop this save as behavior is to eject my drive but doing that makes it impossible for Time Machine to backup my computers. – somas1 Oct 31 '09 at 20:52

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