Does secondary HDD stay off if not used on MBP 13"

[pjny]

Hi,

I just ordered an OWC 120GB Mercury Pro SSD and want to move the original 5400 rpm 500gb drive on my Macbook Pro 13" (2010, 7,1 model) to the Optibay drive using the included Data Doubler Kit. (Thanks to everyone who helped me choose).

I want to use the 5400rpm drive only for storage at the end of the day(move all data) and the SSD for processing video and still images. If I do not access the drive will it stay off and park the heads. I work in areas with a lot of bumps and vibrations and want to know that I am not damaging the HDD 5400rpm with SSD only running.

I heard the putting the HDD in the Optibay slot will disable sudden motion sensor and temperature sensors and I'm afraid that bumps might not trigger the SMS.

Thanks.

 

[movieboy23]

You should be fine. If the heads are parked, then you won't be at risk of damaging the platters within the drive. But just to let you know, I believe OS X defaults to keeping the secondary drive on for at least 10 minutes before it spins down. If you want to change that, just google "hard drive spindown terminal command" and it'll give you the terminal command to change that option. However, you should know that if you set the value too low you'll end up eating a lot more battery since it takes more electricity to spin a drive up from rest than to keep it spinning for a 10 minute interval.

But to answer your question, I do believe that if you put the HDD in the optibay, a trigger of the SMS will not park the heads off a drive in the optibay. It only applies to the main drive, which in your case (and in mine) does nothing since the main boot drive is an SSD.

Problem is if you put the SSD (which I assume to be your boot drive) in the optibay, there have been known problems with waking the computer up from sleep and hibernation modes.

Hope this helps.

 

[WesCole]

However, you should know that if you set the value too low you'll end up eating a lot more battery since it takes more electricity to spin a drive up from rest than to keep it spinning for a 10 minute interval.

This is true. I set my sleep interval at 1 minute via the terminal and it would spin up randomly every 5 minutes or so. I have since set it back to the default 10 minutes and it seems to work a little better. It doesn't help that I have pretty much all my downloads (from browsers), iTunes, Photos, and Dropbox all saved to my optibay drive.