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Imac retina and external drives

T

Tobamory

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 6, 2015
18
0
Hi guys I'm new to Macs and 4 weeks in, liking it thus far but have a question if i may.
I got the new 27 inch retina with 3TB fusion drive of which i have a boot camped Windows 8 for backup, but mainly access it through fusion or parallels.

Ive been converting my movie library with Smart Convertor pro but was kinda annoyed id kinda start filling the 3tb fusion drive with iTunes guff.

So i bought the 8TB WD duo and made is raid 1 so 4TB and its connected and flying.

The question i have is, do you all leave your iMacs on all the time or do you schedule shutdowns etc. Im presuming if you auto shutdown you can't actually dismount the Thunderbolt drive.

I like the way iTunes is sharing everything round my house and streams perfectly to Apple TV iPads etc....

whats best way ?

Reason is I've moved the iTunes Lib to the Thunderbolt drive thus was looking at keeping it on all the time... but whats everyone else do ?

thanks
 
I believe you will find that the vast majority of users on here almost never shutdown and just let it sleep. If you turn on "wake on LAN" it will wake up when the Apple TV needs to stream.
 
Display sleep

I let my display sleep all the time, but the hard drive is seldom asleep, and the computer is rarely turned off.

Have never had a problem related to leaving it on all the time, except for having to replace one, three-year-old MBP hd (after seven laptops, one failure after three years seems acceptable to me).
 
Weaselboy said:
I believe you will find that the vast majority of users on here almost never shutdown and just let it sleep.
Click to expand...

"Vast majority of users" is an over generalization, don't you think?

I shut down my iMac and Mac mini almost every night, but always put my rMBP to sleep. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
 
I have had oodles of problems over several Macs with various energy savings settings, App Nap (I think that's what it's called), and other sleep type settings. Seems that sometimes, especially with powered USB hubs, etc, drives and the Mac are kind of different opinions on whether they should be awake or asleep, and then the OS gets crabby and throws "disk improperly ejected warning."

Which is usually no biggie, except when it trashes your external. I seem to have had more problems with this since using an OWC Thunderbolt enclosure, which auto-shuts down. Sometimes a background process, backup, indexing, etc will be trigged and can't find the drive, and so on.

So now I not only keep the machine on, I use Caffeine to make sure it stays on. And I either manually power down completely, or keep it up and running completely. With an SSD there isn't nearly as much of a penalty for firing it up.
 
I just leave mine on. Only reason I would ever shut it off is due to some crazy electrical storm and when going on vacation.

I can't find a good reason to turn it off other then that and even then my surge protection to my house, in my house and that the iMac is plugged into is pretty good. So turning it off ever is unnecessary.
 
How hard is it to turn on an imac? Seriously? Why waste power at all? Shut mine down when done working. Then again, I have a SSD, so only a few seconds to start up..
 
xgman said:
How hard is it to turn on an imac? Seriously? Why waste power at all? Shut mine down when done working. Then again, I have a SSD, so only a few seconds to start up..
Click to expand...

The power usage is pretty low in sleep mode and not that much less when off.

GERujuI.png
 
Reason I'm asking XGman is my movie collection was stored on a NAS and for the kids to watch anything we have to use boxee PLEX or XBMC boxee and XBMC being the better as they can read flat file and no transcoding.

However we have many iPads in the house 4 I think as well is Apple Tvs, having them all pretty in iTunes with covers etc and then using Apple shareing was a revelation to me it just works no stuttering wifi or not.

But moving the library to an external western digital tunderbolt drive I didn't want it to shutdown somive hidden the drive behind the screen and popped the display to go to sleep I've also added drives to sleep and wake on lan.

If I used a NAS when the thing sleep and come back ITunes gets fussy and forgets the NAS and reverts local again which sucked...

So far it's been great... Fingers crossed
 
Apple has been brilliant lately in terms of their power system design. I, for one, really appreciate it.

Their power supplies exhibit excellent efficiency and power factor. This shows up in the power specifications that Weaselboy posted earlier today.

How does this relate to this thread about "Sleep" mode vs. "Off" mode? To put it into easily understandable terms:

If your "night" is 10 hours long and you pay 10 cents per KW-Hr of electricity, over the course of an entire year you will spend 41 cents to do "sleep" at night and 9 cents to do "off" at night.

It is not a stretch to expect that anyone who can afford an iMac can afford either. I enjoy the convenience of "sleep". It is worth the 32 cents to me.
 
xgman said:
How hard is it to turn on an imac? Seriously? Why waste power at all? Shut mine down when done working. Then again, I have a SSD, so only a few seconds to start up..
Click to expand...

Its not difficult but I use my computer when its off too. It becomes quite inconvenient turning it on and off every time I want to listen to a song or watch a movie.

Plus its power usage while asleep is ~1 watt or so, you buy them in the kilowatt (1000 watts). Thats virtually nothing, letting it sleep for 24 hours a day for a month vs being unplugged 24 hours a day for a month is ~10 cents at my utility rate.

The difference is negligible. Your average HVAC system heating or cooling for an extra 15-20 seconds a day offsets that.
 
So I have switch screen off. Wake on lan, and put disks to sleep
It's been 36 hrs and it's been great, watched movies last night woke this morning to test it wakes up, fired up iPad in bed took about 10 secs for library to appear great stuff.....

Has me covered not switching it off unless I'm away for a few days.
 
WilliamG said:
Likewise. My iMac 5K has never been shut down.
Click to expand...

So I assume you have never installed any updates that required a restart? :)

----------
matreya said:
I am in the 'sleep screen, never sleep/shutdown' group :)
Click to expand...

It is convenient for me to do this as well, since I have a Hot Corner set up to switch the display off. However, it is set to go to sleep after a while and I also never do this overnight.
 
redheeler said:
So I assume you have never installed any updates that required a restart? :)

----------



It is convenient for me to do this as well, since I have a Hot Corner set up to switch the display off. However, it is set to go to sleep after a while and I also never do this overnight.
Click to expand...

I never said I didn't restart for updates. Just that I don't shut off the system. :)
 
Tobamory said:
Hi guys I'm new to Macs and 4 weeks in, liking it thus far but have a question if i may.
I got the new 27 inch retina with 3TB fusion drive of which i have a boot camped Windows 8 for backup, but mainly access it through fusion or parallels.

Ive been converting my movie library with Smart Convertor pro but was kinda annoyed id kinda start filling the 3tb fusion drive with iTunes guff.

So i bought the 8TB WD duo and made is raid 1 so 4TB and its connected and flying.

The question i have is, do you all leave your iMacs on all the time or do you schedule shutdowns etc. Im presuming if you auto shutdown you can't actually dismount the Thunderbolt drive.

I like the way iTunes is sharing everything round my house and streams perfectly to Apple TV iPads etc....

whats best way ?

Reason is I've moved the iTunes Lib to the Thunderbolt drive thus was looking at keeping it on all the time... but whats everyone else do ?

thanks
Click to expand...

Hi to hijack this thread but I'm in a similar position. I'm looking to upgrade my iMac as soon as they (hopefully soon) release a retina 21.5 in mac.....with that I plan to store my itunes library outside of the main HD. How do you like the WD duo? I'm going to end up going this route to store my own library. Do you notice any lag when accessing the files?

And finally...with the Raid setup you're using 4 tb to store the library and the other 4 to backup? Sorry for all the questions but your setup is what I'm ultimately trying to emulate.

To keep this somewhat on topic, I'm in the "put it to sleep" group.
 
Interesting about the power consumption cost with sleep vs shutdown. Personally I still feel comfortable about shutting down at night. Gives me a fresh boot in the morning and may even give potential hackers less opportunity to wake it up and mess with it.
 
DaGrandMastah said:
Hi to hijack this thread but I'm in a similar position. I'm looking to upgrade my iMac as soon as they (hopefully soon) release a retina 21.5 in mac.....with that I plan to store my itunes library outside of the main HD. How do you like the WD duo? I'm going to end up going this route to store my own library. Do you notice any lag when accessing the files?

And finally...with the Raid setup you're using 4 tb to store the library and the other 4 to backup? Sorry for all the questions but your setup is what I'm ultimately trying to emulate.

To keep this somewhat on topic, I'm in the "put it to sleep" group.
Click to expand...

its fine, its has if you have a new drive, when I used a network drive that wasn't great, the TB drive is very fast.

And yes raid 1 or the mirror for safety will give you 4TB usable...
 
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