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A4orce84

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 17, 2012
433
46
Hey Everyone,

I recently installed an SSD as my primary HD, and moves my old spinning disk hard-drive to an optibay as my secondary drive (storage).

My question: Is there an option in OSX Mavericks (or a 3rd party application) that I can force the secondary optibay HD to enter into sleep-mode sooner? I checked the box in the energy saver preferences, to "Put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible" option. But wanted something with a bit more control over it.

Follow-up question: When checking the "Put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible" option, how does that work? Is there a a default time interval where it powers everything down? Does it look at running processes at the time?

Thanks in advance, all help is greatly appreciated!
--Asif
 
I'm not even sure that will apply to an HDD in the optical bay as normally the optical will spin down when not reading anyway.

It does certainly work fine with the HDD in the standard drive bay and the SSD in the optical as I have in my machine.

The drive will likely spin down after a suitable period after its last access....
 
Makes sense, I was warned not to put the primary HD (my SSD in this case) in the optical spot / SATA connector. Since when powering up the laptop from sleep mode, sometimes it won't check the optical HD's SATA connector, and looks at the primary spot only.
 
A lot of those kind of behaviours would likely be very model-specific, I'm lucky enough to have an early-2011 that runs the SSD in the optical at 6GB speed too....touch wood it runs fast and with zero issues....
 
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Ah, I have mid-2010 macbook pro. So before all that good stuff! =)

Any help would be greatly appreciated from anyone else!
 
I've got my ssd in the optical bay and hdd in the main bay, mostly for the SMS sensor to work if I should drop it, and the HDD is more likely to fail so it's easier to get out.

Mine will usually spin down after a bit of time when I'm not accessing it. But more often than not I just eject it. That will spin it down indefinitely. Then I just mount it when I need my storage for iTunes/Aperture etc.

It will still spin back up on occasion, like if you open anything that scans for drives (iStat, disk utility, iTunes, and the like). But for the most part if I'm just browsing or writing something and want some peace and quiet, I'll just eject it.

(had this setup in my late 2008 MB, just moved it to a mid 2010 15" late last yr)
 
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