In the "Energy saver" system preference there's an option marked "Put the hard drive(s) to sleep when possible". I have this turned on so as to save unnecessary tear and wear on my Powerbook G4's internal drive as well as an external Firewire 800 drive which is used to store photos on.
The problem is that when trying to open up new photos in Adobe Bridge CS4 after a while of working in Photoshop, the external drive is put to sleep, resulting in a spinning beachball. I've found two solutions to "wake it up" again:
1) go to the Finder desktop, double-click on some previously unopened (un-cached) folder on the external hard drive. This will wake it up and display the contents of that folder. From then on the beackball disappears and I can open files from Adobe bridge
2) I know I really shouldn't do this, but if the whole computer locks up and all I get is a spinning beachball without any way of exiting I physically turn off the external hard drive (its on/off switch), get the usual MacOS warning message of possibly losing data because I didn't eject it the proper way, then physically turning it on again. After that the beachball disappears and I can once again open files from Adobe Bridge.
I was hoping MacPilot would allow me to configure power management for the two drives separately from each other, but as far as I can see it can't.
Is there a solution to this short of disabling disk power management altogether? I'm using MacOS 10.4.11 on a 1.67 GHz Powerbook G4.
The problem is that when trying to open up new photos in Adobe Bridge CS4 after a while of working in Photoshop, the external drive is put to sleep, resulting in a spinning beachball. I've found two solutions to "wake it up" again:
1) go to the Finder desktop, double-click on some previously unopened (un-cached) folder on the external hard drive. This will wake it up and display the contents of that folder. From then on the beackball disappears and I can open files from Adobe bridge
2) I know I really shouldn't do this, but if the whole computer locks up and all I get is a spinning beachball without any way of exiting I physically turn off the external hard drive (its on/off switch), get the usual MacOS warning message of possibly losing data because I didn't eject it the proper way, then physically turning it on again. After that the beachball disappears and I can once again open files from Adobe Bridge.
I was hoping MacPilot would allow me to configure power management for the two drives separately from each other, but as far as I can see it can't.
Is there a solution to this short of disabling disk power management altogether? I'm using MacOS 10.4.11 on a 1.67 GHz Powerbook G4.