I have a 2009 mini running Snow Leopard as a home server; the files are stored on a NewerTech miniStack v3 drive with a 750GB WD Green drive in it, connected via FW800.
This works fantastically with one exception: I realized while working with iPhoto off of a library stored on the server that the drive keeps going to sleep and spinning back up, resulting in ~10 second stalls while it spins up.
Now, it does this even when I'm accessing the drive almost constantly--certainly no more than 30 seconds of inactivity, if even that much. The state of "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" doesn't matter--happens whether that's on or off. It doesn't, however, seem to do this when I'm accessing files off the drive locally--that is, if I'm using the mini itself, rather than just pulling files over the network. I don't see how this is any different (the network connection is GigE, so the data transfer rate is still high), so maybe it's just that I don't do it often enough to have noticed.
Any suggestions as to what's causing this and/or what I might try to stop it? I can't figure out if it's the WD drive itself doing some sort of power-saving sleep, or if it's the MacOS's fault, and while I could probably prevent it from sleeping by running something that constantly accesses the drive, I'd really rather not if I don't have to.
This works fantastically with one exception: I realized while working with iPhoto off of a library stored on the server that the drive keeps going to sleep and spinning back up, resulting in ~10 second stalls while it spins up.
Now, it does this even when I'm accessing the drive almost constantly--certainly no more than 30 seconds of inactivity, if even that much. The state of "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" doesn't matter--happens whether that's on or off. It doesn't, however, seem to do this when I'm accessing files off the drive locally--that is, if I'm using the mini itself, rather than just pulling files over the network. I don't see how this is any different (the network connection is GigE, so the data transfer rate is still high), so maybe it's just that I don't do it often enough to have noticed.
Any suggestions as to what's causing this and/or what I might try to stop it? I can't figure out if it's the WD drive itself doing some sort of power-saving sleep, or if it's the MacOS's fault, and while I could probably prevent it from sleeping by running something that constantly accesses the drive, I'd really rather not if I don't have to.