"Put hard disks to sleep when possible" - iMac with Flash Storage

[pete78]

Hi all,

Aside from whether one should sleep or shut down the iMac nightly, what about whether to enable the following option: "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

Is there any benefit to enabling this option on a 2012 iMac with the 768GB Flash storage? I would think the option wouldn't be as useful on an iMac compared to a laptop, and especially an iMac with Flash Storage (compared to a spinning drive).

Obviously, the drawback to enabling the option is that the iMac then takes longer to wake from sleep.

Before I permanently disable the option, please let me know if there are any benefits that I would be missing out on. If it would somehow extend the life of the Flash Storage, then I would be willing to keep the option enabled.

Thanks!

 

[kapalua12]

And secondly, does Trim work on this new 768 GB SSD? If so you would want lots of idle time and not sleep time, for Trim to do it's magic.

On my PC's with Raid 0 volumes I simply logoff and never let the computer sleep or hibernate so Trim can work overnight.

 

[jamesjingyi]

I think this is just something that they forgot to take out if you ask me My MBA also says this and idk why because flash isn't really put to sleep as it is left alone unless it is being used...

 

[joe-h2o]

Hi all,

Aside from whether one should sleep or shut down the iMac nightly, what about whether to enable the following option: "Put hard disks to sleep when possible".

Is there any benefit to enabling this option on a 2012 iMac with the 768GB Flash storage? I would think the option wouldn't be as useful on an iMac compared to a laptop, and especially an iMac with Flash Storage (compared to a spinning drive).

Obviously, the drawback to enabling the option is that the iMac then takes longer to wake from sleep.

Before I permanently disable the option, please let me know if there are any benefits that I would be missing out on. If it would somehow extend the life of the Flash Storage, then I would be willing to keep the option enabled.

Thanks!

A sleeping Mac will *always* spin the drives down, regardless of what setting you choose.

The benefit of that setting is spinning down the drives during periods of inactivity when your Mac is still awake and running, generally for power saving and noise reasons.

It will make no difference to wake times from sleep, since the drives will always spin down.

SSDs are not affected by this setting.

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I think this is just something that they forgot to take out if you ask me My MBA also says this and idk why because flash isn't really put to sleep as it is left alone unless it is being used...

It's left in because you might connect your MBA up to an external spinning drive in an office or home situation. There's no reason not to have the option still there as long as spinning drives still exist and are popular, even on a machine that only has internal SSD storage.

 

[cmdawson]

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