External Hard-drive Spin-up

[Yr Blues]

I bought a .5 TB external hard-drive a while ago and noticed that it spins down and parks itself a lot. When I play MP3s from the external, VLC and other programs don't cache the whole song, so when it decides to spin down, it has to spin back up to play where it left off.

Is there a setting to force the hard-drive to not park itself all the time? Or a setting to make it cache large files at playback?

 

[XianPalin]

In the System Preferences under "Energy Saver" there is a setting "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". If you uncheck that, it won't put the drive to sleep. However, the external drive might have something built-in to spin down when not in use.

Also, this will be system-wide, so your other drives won't spin down either, which can shorten the life span of the drives and use more power.

The drive shouldn't be spinning down if you are accessing it enough - mine only spin down if I've left a video paused for a long time and then come back to it. I'd suggest pulling up the drive in finder to make it spin up before you unpause the video / music.

 

[bertpalmer]

What make is it?

Maybe check the manufactures website>?

 

[Yr Blues]

Well, I want it to spin down but it's annoying when the 10 minute song I'm playing stops and waits for the HD to spin back up to play the rest of the song. I guess I'll have to use iTunes because it caches the whole song. I hate having to browse hundreds of mislabeled songs in iTunes instead of dragging a folder in VLC.

I'll check with the manufacturer. Thanks for the suggestions.