This took some time for me to find out, but there was some process on my OSX Server that was churning away at my drives. I really didn’t mind leaving my drives on, but having it spin too often would lead it to an earlier death due to mechanical failure.

After some digging, i managed to identify that a process related to some share-point backup was running a “du” command. This caused the CPU load to increase, disk temperature to increase, and it didn’t seem to be doing anything beneficial to me at this point.

Granted that the share-point was an external storage and it was already configured on a RAID, i didn’t figure that i needed anything more.

How do you then remove this action that the server was taking? There apparently was a folder in /etc/server_backup that contains various configuration of the action of server_backup. Inside, the file 55-sharePoints.plist determines the paths that this backup will run. Adding in the exclusion paths does the trick:.

<key>ExclusionPaths</key>
<string>/Volumes/AttachedVolume</string>

Saved me some CPU cycles right there.