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mattheww3271946
mattheww3271946
Known Participant
September 22, 2025
Answered

How to stop external SSD blinking and getting hot after I've closed Lightroom

  • September 22, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 280 views

My LR catalague and photos etc are stored on my 2TB external (Samsung Shield) SSD drive. Even when I have closed Lightroom my SSD drive continues to flash and get warm/hot for hours. It doesnt do this before I open LR ..only when I have been using LR and then close it.

 

I'm using a M4 Mac Mini with Tahoe 26 installed (the problem has been going on for months though) and the latest version of LR Classic 14.5.1

 

Ejecting the SSD is the only way to stop the SSD from conitinuing to blink and get hot.

 

How do I get LR to actually close and stop creating work for my SSD drive once its been closed down?

If I leave the SSD to blink and get hot overnight - will it eventually catch up with whatever work it is doing? I don't want to overheat my SSD though.

 

Hope somone has the solution - thanks 

 

Correct answer Conrad_C
quote

I juts double checked and no - neither LR or Adobe are showing as running in the background

By @mattheww3271946

 

Then it could be something macOS is doing, such as Spotlight indexing the volume. For example, if the CPU tab in Activity Monitor told you that Spotlight or “mdworker” was very busy at the same time you see the SSD light flashing a lot, it could be Spotlight. In that case you’d consider forcing a rebuild of the Spotlight index on that volume, or just Force Quit the excessively busy process.

 

Another possibility…is the Mac running any additional non-Apple software that enhances search, builds previews of, caches contents of, or claims to “optimize” or “clean up” any volumes? Those could run in the background and access any volumes found to be mounted.

 

(Geeky potential solution) Sometimes I can’t eject a volume and I don’t know what’s tying it up because I thought I quit everything. In some cases, the utility software Sloth (free) can help because it can identify which apps are holding open specific documents or resources. One or two times I discovered that the reason macOS wasn’t letting go of a volume was because macOS QuickLook or a similar background service was still holding open something on that volume, long after I last used that feature.

1 reply

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
September 22, 2025

@mattheww3271946: "Even when I have closed Lightroom my SSD drive continues to flash and get warm/hot for hours."

 

After exiting LR, start Activity Monitor. Does it show that Lightroom Classic is still running in background, even though you've tried to exit it?

mattheww3271946
mattheww3271946Author
Known Participant
September 23, 2025

@johnrellis I juts double checked and no - neither LR or Adobe are showing as running in the background

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
September 23, 2025

@mattheww3271946: "neither LR or Adobe are showing as running in the background"

 

That suggests the problem is not a LR issue and the problem lies elsewhere.  LR sometimes doesn't exit cleanly and continues to run in background, which might have accounted for these symptoms; but if it's not running, it doesn't seem possible that it could somehow cause the SSD to be active for hours after it exits.

 

You might try clicking on the Disk tab of Activity Monitor after several hours of that activity to see if you can determine which process might be accessing the SSD.

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