Mac OS X is weird sometimes. Although most of the time its design is logical, there are also weird behaviors. For example, when there are firewire external hard drive connected, they will SLOW DOWN your Mac when you try to open “open and save dialog” and such, because the OS will pause and wait for those drives to spin up. USB and Firewire drives sleep when we don’t use them. But once we need to use them, they need time to start spinning. This annoys me a lot but I did not find any solution until now.
So from this webpage I found these automator apps. Click once, unmount all the firewire external disks. Click another time, mount all the firewire external disks. So now I can easily mount my firewire hard drives only when I need to so that they won’t slow me down any more.
In fact, I do not want these apps to be in my dock. What you can do is to open them in Automator and change them to a finder script or script menu script. That is much better for my habit of running scripts from script menu.