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Keep Drive Spinning?

C

Che Castro

macrumors 603
Original poster
May 21, 2009
5,997
789
is anybody using this script/app
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31158/keep-drive-spinning

i have 3 external drives and is driving me crazy, the spinning beach ball, when the drives wakes up,
going to energy saver and unchecking put hard disks to sleep" does not work with my external drives , toshiba external

is Keep Drive Spinning safe to use ? it doesn't say if i reboot my mac do i have to run the program again ?

does letting the drive not sleep shorten its life span?
 
You think you've got problems? Try these problems instead:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1655890/

The backup drives you have remind me of one I had a long time ago. It's sleep cycle was programmed into the the firmware of its interface card. About every 3 minutes of inactivity it would go to sleep. It couldn't be changed. The only way you could change it was to modify the sleep settings in system preferences to make it even worse...in other words happen even more frequently.

Thats just the way that drive was but some drives have software drivers that allow you to adjust those settings. If you have such drivers and they can be configured, you'll want to adjust the sleep settings so they never go to sleep or they go to sleep after a long interval.

The software you mention probably puts a tiny file on the drive and then every minute or so reads it, stopping the drive from going to sleep. I'd assume more details about it can be had from the developer.
 
macrobert after 2 days of using "Keep Drive Spinning" everything is working 100%. i have not gotten any spinning beach balls, is all nice and smooth
 
No matter what I do, I cannot get this to work. I have it installed for each and every drive, and nothing happens. Any advice?
 
Has anyone found an alternative to this with Yosemite? The latest version from March doesn't seem to work with it. I've sent a message to the developer asking for an update. I have an external drive with my Plex Media Server videos and the drive decides to go to sleep in the middle of playback. I'm guessing Plex streams a large chunk and then after a few minutes the drive, using it's own settings, powers down. Keep Drive Spinning's script let's the drive stay active every minute or so. Anyone know what general effect that has on the entire OS' sleep settings? I kind of want the main system to still stay asleep after 15min, just not letting that drive spin down.

Dorkington, if you are using Yosemite it will not work.

For some odd reason, if I use Teamviewer from my tablet to go into the iMac during playback, the video stream will be fine for the duration. Even if I exit out of it. I'm going to ask on the Plex forums too if the they can implement a script in the software to keep External HDDs awake and spinning.
 
I used it for a couple months to keep an Airport Time Capsule from sleeping. At the time, I was using the Time Capsule as a network drive for my iTunes library. Seemed to work fine for me, but I no longer use it since I now have a Mini for an iTunes server.

I believe that all this program does is "touch" a file on the drive at a user-specified interval. The unix touch command just changes the modification date of a file without changing its contents. No idea about Yosemite, I was running 10.8 at the time.
 
I'd like a way to keep my disks spinning as long as I'm using the machine, like if my display isn't locked. I haven't found anything quite like that yet.
 
Not sure about other disks but my LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt (1) drive follows the power settings for disks perfectly. I actually prefer it to spin down when not in use since I only use it for some occasionally used documents, movies, and music there is a lot of downtime where it's just as well off since nothing else in my system makes any noise.

If you set the disk sleep to off it should show a 0 minute disk sleep in the power settings under System Information. Not sure why it wouldn't work, maybe some USB drives have their own power settings.
 
65535 said:
I actually prefer it to spin down when not in use since I only use it for some occasionally used documents, movies, and music there is a lot of downtime where it's just as well off since nothing else in my system makes any noise.
Click to expand...



Unfortunately some apps will spin up all external HDD whether it needs them or not which beachballs.
 
Yeah, iTunes takes a few seconds to respond as the disks spin up but I don't mind it too much as it's only for the first song and I can't stand the sound of the disks spinning if I'm just working quietly.
 
Yeah, but it scales poorly for people with more than 1 external hard drive. It does not spin them up simultaneously, it does one at a time. I have 5 external hard drives so your few seconds is my half a minute. At that point it hurts.
 
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