Under energy settings do you use the "put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible?

[jjahshik32]

I'm curious as to how many people use this feature?

I am kind of stuck in the middle about using this feature or not. Everytime I use this feature it seems to be working efficiently and saving more energy and lowering heat BUT I noticed that harddrives in your mac pro can turn on for no reason (such as launching dashboard). I'm just afraid that it will abuse the hdd of putting it to sleep off and on.

Anyone else use this feature?

 

[alphaod]

It really depends on how you use your computer; it's like a car, it's better to drive a lot of long distances than make many stop-and-go trips over the same period.

If you're computer is on all the time doing nothing half the time, then it's best to save some energy and sleep the drives. On the other hand, if you're constantly working on the computer, you'll wear the actuator off-load ramp and spindle a lot more if the drives keep sleeping and have to spin up again.

 

[gr8tfly]

I have drive-sleep off when on a/c power and enabled when on battery. When I'm on a/c, I'm also plugged into my Firewire chain of 5 drives. It never failed - the drive I needed was inevitably spun-down. Keep in mind, these are all desktop drives and do not spin up as fast as notebook drives (which are designed for constant spin up/down cycles). But, as previously posted, it all depends on how you use your machine. If you don't open/save often or don't use the Finder often, you wouldn't notice the delay as much.

 

[UltraNEO*]

Umm... Nope, never!
This is what my machine does, when it's idle...