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I have an internal disk which is noisy and seldom used. With previous versions of OSX I was able to spin it down by using diskutil eject, but with the latest High Sierra 10.13.4, after a few seconds it powers up again.

I am looking for a way to stop it powering up again or totally disabling it without physically opening the Mac.

Is this possible with software?

Note 1: Disk is not even mounted, I have it disabled in /etc/fstab. No matter which the sleeping time is, the disk never spins down. It only does afer running diskutils eject, but in few seconds it restarts. In previous versions of OS X it didnt happen, it switched off correctly.

Note 2: In the previous OS version (El capitan), I have it normally mounted, and unmounting it from the Finder was enough, it switched off correctly. This does not work now either.

Note 3: I tried disabling (kill -SIGSTOP) the processes "diskarbitrationd" and "diskmanagementd" just after disk ejection but result is the same, disk respwans after some seconds.

How to know which process is accessing the unmounted unit?

Javier Vales Alonso
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    I’m curious what your sleep time is and if unmounting it helps? If so we can help you script that to run periodically or once at log in - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/3978/ – bmike May 27 '18 at 13:38
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    Disk is not even mounted, I have it disabled in /etc/fstab. No matter which the sleeping time is, the disk never spins down. It only does afer running diskutils eject, but in few seconds it restarts. In previous versions of OS X it didnt happen, it switched off correctly. – Javier Vales Alonso May 27 '18 at 13:57
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    For the sake of completeness, in the previous OS version (El capitan), I have it normally mounted, and unmounting it from the Finder was enough, it switched off correctly. This does not work now either. – Javier Vales Alonso May 27 '18 at 14:07
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    Be sure to edit those details in to the main post - people often skip the comments entirely or they get hidden / cleared periodically for various reasons – bmike May 27 '18 at 14:08
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    What specific Mac are you using and what drive connection technology is being used internally. I assume some flavour of SATA. – IconDaemon May 27 '18 at 15:16
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    Yes, SATA. iMAC from late 2009. – Javier Vales Alonso May 27 '18 at 21:30
  • If the disk was mounted (perhaps worth doing for troubleshooting?), then lsof might help to find the process that is accessing it. – Ashley Oct 02 '18 at 17:21

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