NTFS for Mac not letting 2nd internal drive spin down

[chris_nwb]

On my MBP, I installed an SSD as my main drive and moved the HDD to the optibay. The HDD was formatted with NTFS, and I intend to save mostly media files here and be accessible by Windows (via Boot Camp) and OS X.

I access the NTFS partition on the HDD only occasionally, but it doesn't spin down if the NTFS for Mac driver is on. My MBP loses battery faster.

- I tried setting "Disable Last Access Time" on the drive but it still has the same behavior.
- There are no other processes accessing the drive--I verified using the "sudo fs_usage | grep name_of_volume" command.
- If I disable the driver, unmount then mount back the partition, the drive spins down after a period of inactivity.

This pretty much means NTFS for Mac is doing something on the drive and not letting it spin down.

Thoughts? Any fixes?

[Paragon_Matt]

Well I will clarify that the NTFS for Mac software is simply a file system driver which allows you to read/write in NTFS based file system, we don't modify the drives in any way, it may simply be an issue of the drive running while your system is, hence the HDD not spinning down.

[chris_nwb]

That's what I thought so too, but with troubleshooting steps I've done in my last post, and now, uninstalling Paragon NTFS and replacing it with Tuxera, I'm 100% sure Paragon NTFS 10.0 (when enabled) is the root cause of my 2nd drive not spinning down.

With Tuxera, the drive spins down if the NTFS partition is not accessed--as expected. It may be a bug with Paragon NTFS.

Now on my fully charged MBP and the HDD not spinning, I have 7'50" battery left. Earlier with the HDD which kept on spinning, I only got 5'.

[Paragon_Matt]

I will look into this issue and if I can confirm the bug, I will have it reported to development.