How to keep an external running?

[neutralmilk]

Hi. I just bought a 500g external drive. This drive to be exact. All in all I'm rather pleased with it. One thing I want to use it for is capturing video inside the online game World of Warcraft. The game itself has a mac video capture utility built in and I can set the path to record to my external to be less taxing on my mac. The problem is when I start recording for the first time in awhile the drive has to warm up from sleeping. This causes the video to stop recording to the drive as it can't handle all the data coming in while it is idling and starts revving up to where it's working actively. All subsequent captures after the drive is no longer idling are captured fine. It causes the WoW client to freeze and sometimes lock up entirely when it's coming off of idling though.

So is there any way that I can keep the drive running instead of sleeping while I have the WoW application running? Can I tell the drive to keep working while certain apps are open? If I can how do I do this? Also is it bad to have the drive going then actively running for hours at a time? If you can think of another way to alleviate this I would appreciate it very much. Thank you for your time.

 

[roland.g]

Before you go to use it, just click on the finder and explore the drive, that should wake it up. You can also go to energy settings and set hard disks not to go to sleep but that will be all the time for all applications. It is probably just easier to manually wake it up before you use it.

 

[neutralmilk]

The problem with manually waking it up is the game itself is a full screen application and I want to record video on the fly and the drop of a hat. Minimizing then waking it up then remaximizing WoW to do it defeats that purpose. It also goes back to sleep after only like 5-10 minutes of non recording so it constantly needs to be reawakened. If I could prolong the period before it goes to sleep that would work too.