manually spin down HD in X?

[rainman::|:|]

okay, i'm stumped, how do you manually spin down hard drives in Jaguar? i have two drives that are used frequently, setting "spin down HD when possible" makes the external spin down too soon... but at night, i want to tell them to spin down because of the noise (my computer folds so it can't sleep). i don't want to have to go into Energy Saver every day to keep resetting this...

is there some terminal command to spin down the drives? some 3rd party utility that i havent found? is this feature available on portables?

thanks!
pnw

 

[Bear]

Do what I did...request Apple make a change in the nergy saver. If enough people request it, maybe they'll implement it.

Basically I want a time delay before spinning down the disk. I'm afraid of too many spin down/spin up cycles with the current choice of "spin down whenever possible"

In truth, even a two minute delay over the current choice would prevent a lot of spin down/up cycles for me. Or so it seems. I'd probably set it for somewhere between 2 and 5 minutes for battery use and 10 to 15 when plugged into the wall.

 

[zimv20]

i'm going to split hairs here. everytime i see someone refer to X, i think they're talking about X11, not OSX.

and since X11 is now available on OSX, it may lessen confusion to allow X to continue to mean X-windows, since that has been the established meaning since the 80s.

hair splitting over.

 

[FelixDerKater]

I wish I knew how to spin down the HD in my PowerBook. I have the Energy Saver preferences set to spin down the drive when possible. I use it to take notes in lectures and the drive won't ever spin down. The only open app was OmniOutliner. To make sure it wasn't the app, I tried taking notes in TextEdit one day. Still had the same problem... It would be nice if the thing would spin down. The buzz of the drive is a bit annoying in a fairly quiet room.

 

[zimv20]

Originally posted by FelixDerKater
The only open app was OmniOutliner. To make sure it wasn't the app, I tried taking notes in TextEdit one day. Still had the same problem...

it'll do it if no user apps are open. though you're not running anything, unix is. and it writes to the disk all the time, even when seemingly idle.

open up a terminal and type (w/o the %):

% ps -aux | grep root | grep -v grep | wc -l

(that last character is an ell)

that'll tell you how many root-owned (i.e. not you) processes are running. i've got 34 right now.

or run top (from the command line) and watch how stuff changes every second