strange behavior with WD My Book Pro 250gb

[mattball]

I am currently using SD! with a Western Digital 250gb triple interface external drive. I love the drive and SD! but I've noticed some odd behavior.

After every time that SD! runs (which is nightly for me), the drive seems to have nearly constant drive activity. The My Book drive (as some of you may know) has an LED capacity gauge/activity indicator on the front. Even know, at least 4 hours after my backup finished, the drive is still showing constant activity.

I can always stop this by unmounting or ejecting the drive and then remounting it, but that's not a good solution. I'd like to figure out what is really happening any why.

I had this same issue on my old aluminum powerbook as well as on my macbook pro. Both times I used the FW800 interface to back up.

Any ideas?

[dnanian]

Sounds like Spotlight, Matt. Try adding the drive into the Spotlight Preference Pane's "Privacy" tab.

[mattball]

So, this could be Spotlight indexing (or whatever the OS X word is for it) my new backup?
I'd thought about that, but I wasn't sure it would be that since I use Smart Backup and so it's not like every single file gets changed in a given backup. I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the fast reply!

[mattball]

My biggest concern with all the extra drive activity is that it would lead to a premature death, a particular previous one of which prompted me to start backing up in the first place.
As one of my friends likes to say, "there are two kinds of people: those who back up, and those who will."

[dnanian]

Yes, it's spotlight indexing the backup. The index gets recreated each time, but since there's not much point indexing the backup, I'd just add it to Privacy.

[mattball]

It seems to have fixed the problem. I'm happy!
Thanks so much for the help! You're quite on top on things.

[dnanian]

Glad to help.