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Preventing External Drives From Spinning Down

MacDann

MacDann

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 27, 2007
888
246
Can see the end of the Earth from here
I have an external FW RAID 0 enclosure that I use as a scratch disk for video editing. It contains an Oxford 912 chipset to handle the RAID duties.

One thing that I find to be a nuisance - after a period of inactivity, the drives spin down and as a result, take a good 10-15 seconds to spin back up again when addressed.

I seem to recall back in the days of OS X 10.3 and earlier, there was a terminal command that prevented external drives from spinning down, something like this if my memory serves me correctly:

sudo pmset -a spindown 0

Can anyone confirm that this is still a valid command in OS X 10.4.9? I'll probably try it anyway, as I'm sure it can't hurt anything, but it would be nice to get some validation.

Thanks in advance,

MD
 
Unchecking "put hard disks to sleep when not in use" in the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences would solve this problem. And yes, if you put your computer fully to sleep, the hard drives will still spin down. This just prevents them from spinning down while the computer is awake.
 
killmoms said:
Unchecking "put hard disks to sleep when not in use" in the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences would solve this problem. And yes, if you put your computer fully to sleep, the hard drives will still spin down. This just prevents them from spinning down while the computer is awake.
Click to expand...

<head slap>

Duh! I had totally forgotten about that. Nothing like being humbled...

:rolleyes:

I never put it to sleep when it's on - it's either working or off, so the sleep issue is moot.

Thanks!

MD
 
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