How to stop an external drive from sleeping?

[jetsonhk]

I have a WD external drive on my new iMac, but for some reason it goes to sleep all the time, so when I save a file to the desktop, for some reason it takes 30 seconds longer because I can hear my WD drive "warming up" - its annoying as it gives my iMac a delay on many things it does...how can I stop the external drive from sleeping - or is that a bad idea?

Also on a side note - I did use the WD drive on a PC - do I need to reformat it for Mac to make it work better?

Thanks Y'all.

 

[richard.mac]

to make it not sleep untick "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in Energy Saver in System Preferences.

the major upside to this is that your external drive's disk platters will constantly be spinning rather than spinning down all the time which will give them a greater lifespan. the minor downside is it will constanlty make a noise .

if you formatted your external drive in Windows and your Mac can still write to it, its probably formatted as FAT. this is fun its just your can write more than 4 GBs of file/s to it at any one time. so if you want to work with large files you should reformat it as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) using Disk Utility.

 

[jetsonhk]

to make it not sleep untick "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in Energy Saver in System Preferences.

the major upside to this is that your external drive's disk platters will constantly be spinning rather than spinning down all the time which will give them a greater lifespan. the minor downside is it will constanlty make a noise .

if you formatted your external drive in Windows and your Mac can still write to it, its probably formatted as FAT. this is fun its just your can write more than 4 GBs of file/s to it at any one time. so if you want to work with large files you should reformat it as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) using Disk Utility.

Actually I did that already but it still goes to sleep...I want to unplug it but it has some files I need - and it seems like a pain to unplug/plug it back in all the time.

 

[richard.mac]

yeh that happens to me sometimes it might be a bug in Leopard's power management

...I want to unplug it but it has some files I need - and it seems like a pain to unplug/plug it back in all the time.

youll have to unplug it to use with a nother computer unless you share it.