Using Applescript to Unmount and then spin down disks?

I'm not sure if this is something that can be controlled directly.

If you install Xcode, there is a utility called SpindownHD.app located at /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools/SpindownHD.app that shows the status of connected storage devices. For my external drive it shows "Active" when I can hear it spinning, and "Sleep" when it spins down.

I am able to make it go into sleep by performing an eject on the device, which you can do via 'diskutil eject <dev>' where dev is the BSD name - obtained from 'diskutil list' or Disk Utility.

I'm not sure if all devices support going to sleep when ejected, but you could certainly use AppleScript to run the eject command periodically if it works for yours.

 

This script should work nicely. It acts as a toggle. Save it as an application and you just need to run it when you want the disk to spin down. You need to run it again to access it, but it's a very fast process since it isn't a full "eject".

Code:

set diskName to "Name Of Disk"
tell application "Finder" to set diskExists to (disk diskName exists)
if diskExists is true then
	do shell script "diskutil umount " & quoted form of diskName
else
	do shell script "diskutil mount " & quoted form of diskName
end if

Get the disk name from "diskutil list"

99% of the time my code just sits here on these forums and looks pretty though. ^.^ Oh well. I enjoyed myself.

 

I heard about Jettison the other day via a podcast. The user said it worked fine but didn't say much more.