Force Western Digital MyBook to NOT sleep?

[Steven Jackson]

Hi,

I have an iMac with three daisy chained 500GB HDD drives connected by FireWire. They are set us a concatenated RAID, giving me 1.5 TB for my ever increasing iTunes library! These drives automatically stop spinning when not in use.

However, this functionality is causing problems. The drives are not always available when the iMac expects them to be, leading to pauses, spinning beach balls, and (twice) total freezes followed by kernal panics.

Does anyone know any way, legitimate or hacky, to keep the drives spinning and available all the time?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Vader]

I would not recommend doing something like that, as the drives will die a lot sooner, and could overheat if they don't have fans.

 

[Steven Jackson]

Hmm. Any other suggestions for improving my situation?

Steve

 

[zioxide]

I would not recommend doing something like that, as the drives will die a lot sooner, and could overheat if they don't have fans.

I doubt that. They're more likely do die early because of all the spinning up/down every 10 minutes.

 

[NATO]

I have a cron job set up to touch a hidden file on the drive every 5-10 minutes in order to keep the drive 'Active' so that it won't auto-spindown. I detailed it a bit in this older thread

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/298694/

It's easy if you're comfortable with the terminal, but hard to explain otherwise.