Turning off the internal hard drive

Have you tried unmounting the drive?

There should be a way to do it in terminal using the diskutil command.

Does it still show up in Disk Utility after it has been unmounted? If so, that might be able to mount it as well.

efedor said:

I have a 64gb ssd drive that I use to boot up my macbook pro 15(classic) and a 320 gb on my optibay. I would like to know if there is such a program like smc fan control but for internal hard drives in order to turn off or "PARK" the 320gb hd, This would help increase my battery live as well as making it more quiet. Thanks

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After 10 minutes of idle, the drive shuts down itself.

You can un-mount and mount it in Disk Utility

efedor said:

Thanks for the advice, I am able to unmount it and mount it back on using disk utility. Only problem is... it still spinning!!! and I want it to stop so it doesn't use up the battery, I don't want it on for 10 minutes for it to shut down, I only want to activate it when I need to store large files.

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Hello all,

I have the same problem. Using an SSD as main drive and a 2nd Harddrive with optibay in my unibody macbook.

Even if I unmount the drive with different methods, it always starts spinning again after a couple of minutes. Does anyone know how to completely shut off the 2nd internal drive?

Thank you very much.

no help?

anyone?

It must be possible to stop the second internal harddrive from spinning somehow.

You could install a switch that physically disconnects the power after you unmount it.

Enable the "put the hard drives to sleep when possible" option in Preferences -> Energy Saver, and the drives will spin-off during inactivity. Works for me.

fehhkk said:

Enable the "put the hard drives to sleep when possible" option in Preferences -> Energy Saver, and the drives will spin-off during inactivity. Works for me.

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this

Imac 27

Hey.

Im very interested in this option too. If I unmount the internal hard drive of my imac 27 will it stop completely and stop spinning and therefore be completely quiet?

I did a test with the Mac OS X dvd. I restarted using the dvd and wen to disk utility, where I unmounted the internal hard drive. However, it continued to make noise every 30 seconds or so. I could hear the hard drive spinning.

Then, I enabled the "put the disk to sleep when possible" and tried again. The hard drive seemed to stop completely and I couldnt hear anything, so I was very glad. Is this test viable? Would it be the same If I bought an external hard drive or SSD and unmount the internal hard drive of the imac? I mean, would it stop completely or would it turn on automatically every now and then?

Thanks.

sorry to pick up on an old thread but I am having similar concerns.
i.e. I have an SSD in my optibay, which is set to be the boot drive and a momentus xt in my primary hard drive bay. When I unmount it it spins down, but then after a while it spins up again (although it does not mount). I have turned off spotlight indexing for the drive and uninstalled istat widget, which as far as I understood could wake up a drive.
It still spins up randomly...
Is there some software that could tell me what is accessing that drive? Neither activity monitor nor console seem to be very telling for this.
Also, strange thing... using the developer software SPINDOWNHD even when my xt in unmounted and parked it looks like ACTIVE. I never managed to make it inactive or sleeping.
Any clues?
Thanks

Solution

If you're still wondering how to do this, you have to eject the disk, not just unmount it. Charlie.naylor posted a perfect script for ejecting the drive. Just change "Backup" to the name of the drive you want to eject.

if you have xcode installed, it contains an app called SpindownHD that lets you configure sleep timers for devices attached to your sata controller.

Why not just change the spindown from 10 min (default) to 1 min?

That way after 1 min of inactivity it'll spin down?

Terminal:
Sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

millerb7 said:

Why not just change the spindown from 10 min (default) to 1 min?

That way after 1 min of inactivity it'll spin down?

Terminal:
Sudo pmset -a disksleep 1

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This is excellent solution! I was wondering if you can decrease the spindown time to 30 sek.?

[[ Yes I can unmount it but how do I access it when I need it. ]]

Use the free app called "Semulov".

Old thread, but perhaps this may help someone...