Optibay and (real) spindown script?

[Goldfinger]

Hi there,

I just upgraded my MBP with an SSD in the optibay (HDD in the original spot because of noise, vibration and SMS). But as I don't need the HDD all that often I've come to use the script that's out there to spin down the drive, which works. But when you put the MBP to sleep and wake it back up the hard drive is still unmounted but the hard drive does spin up. If I run the script again it spins down again.

Is there any way to permanently spin down the drive ? I'm guessing no, unfortunately.

If not, I could use something like SleepWatcher to execute the script on wake so that I don't need to do it manually.
If I were to do that, would it be possible to run the script only while on battery power? (can I do that with AppleScript? A sort of "if on battery power then do...")
I don't need the drive to spin down while plugged in.

I really want to have the HDD spun down all the time as I use the battery a lot and it does take quite a hit with the HDD on.

 

[dusk007]

I think running it on wake up is the only real solution.

I simply access the script via Alfred. which usually meant to press 3 keys and done. It was so quick whenever the hdd made a sound shouldn't I hit them.

Now however I have switched my 320GB HDD for 1TB and this time I formated it all in exFAT. Before it was one partition HFS+ and one NTFS. Now the disk sleep works which for some reason never did work properly before.

Maybe you should try it. I never run those scripts anymore. Disksleep is set to 1 min and it very rarely wakes up when it shouldn't and within a minute it sleeps again.
Works quite well now without any scripts.

I assume that either Spotlight just ran amok on my HFS+ or the NTFS driver didn't work. I tried to exclude both drives from spotlight but that didn't work too well since everytime it was unmounted spotlight forgot the settings. It stopped searching them though as it never found anything on them but who knows it might still have checked them all the time.
Maybe spotlight is smarter about accessing exFAT partitions. Who knows.

Yes and if you have istat running. That thing has a bug with the smart monitoring. It does check (and wake up) the drives no matter what. It really doesn't care if smart monitoring is checked. The only solution I know is to set the interval to 1 hour in which case it only wakes every hour or disable istat sensors.

I don't see the battery life taking any significant hit when the HDD is running but I simply prefer it spun down because of noise. 5400rpm but it still is so much more quiet when it is off.

 

[had2B]

Yes and if you have istat running. That thing has a bug with the smart monitoring. It does check (and wake up) the drives no matter what. It really doesn't care if smart monitoring is checked. The only solution I know is to set the interval to 1 hour in which case it only wakes every hour or disable istat sensors.

.

seems to be fixed now. in iStats Menus I unchecked "monitor SMART drive temps" and my internal drive stays spun-down after being ejected.