Sleep hard drives manually?

[MacsAreBetter\]

Hello dudes,

I've got an SSD and an HDD in my Macbook Pro, and only barely use the HDD when I'm watching movies etc. So there's a program like GfxCardStatus that lets you choose which graphics card to run, is there a similar (pref. taskbar) application that lets you choose which drive is in use and which one is asleep?

I know for a fact that SSD's use less power and make no noise, while a spinning hard drive uses more battery, is louder, and has potential failure problems.

Thanks so much,
Mike

 

[Detrius]

No, it makes no sense to choose which hard drive is awake. It's not conceptually similar to the graphics card status that you reference. You can set the spindown/disksleep timer, but you can't (so far as I can tell) explicitly tell a drive to go to sleep. In the Energy Saver preferences pane, there's an option to put hard disks to sleep when possible. When this is on, disks will go to sleep when they have not been accessed in ten minutes. This amount of time can be changed with "pmset" at the command line. Setting it too low will result in a physical hard drive being spun up often which drains the battery and decreases disk life. Setting it too high results in the drive being left to spin when it's not needed, which drains the battery.

 

[WiBu]

I'm not certain that this will work (nothing to test it on right now), but you can try going into Disk Utility and unmounting the volume(s). You will probably have to remount manually too (that's if it works in the first place).

 

[riptideMBP]

I'm not certain that this will work (nothing to test it on right now), but you can try going into Disk Utility and unmounting the volume(s). You will probably have to remount manually too (that's if it works in the first place).

For me having my disk unmounted worked until I put my laptop to sleep (on wake the disk started spinning again). I resorted to trusting the sleep timer most of the time, and using a script to mount/unmount my hard drive when im on battery.