2.5" drive upgrade -suggestions?

[h9826790]

Happy new year!

A few weeks down the line I can say the new 2TB Seagate Barracuda (ST2000LM015) is working fine in the external G-drive enclosure. One catch though: it appears that the drive doesn't ever go to sleep, despite enabling the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" option in the OSX Energy saver preference. Is there a special way to enable this?

That option only applicable to internal drive.

 

[macstatic]

I see.
Is there some way to enable a sleep option for external drives?

 

[ZapNZs]

Hypothetically, the energy saver preferences should allow you to do this. In reality, not all enclosures and not all drives work with this.

Some of it seems drive-specific (presumably drive firmware overriding OS settings?) where some of it seems enclosure-specific and some of it seems to be a combination of an enclosure + a drive + an interface + a specific OS. For example, a G-Drive Pro enclosure I have does not spin down any drive regardless of what HDD I am using and regardless of whether I am using FW800, eSATA, or USB 3.1.1. Alternatively, a Samsung HDD I have does not spin down even if I put it in an enclosure that my WD or HGST drives spin down without issue. Further, I have an older WD enclosure that will spin the drive down with FW800, but will not with USB 2.0.

This seems to be something that some Mac, Windows, and Linux Users all experience to some degree, and to date I have not personally seen a single explanation for why (with that said, I'm far from the central authority on hard drives so there could be a reason just beyond my understanding! Does Mac have its own hdparm setting?)

 

[HDFan]

ZapNZs response makes sense, although my experiences have only been exclosure specific. Some of my external enclosures go to sleep just fine (Promise, OWC), others don't sleep or dismount unexpectedly.