Resolved Your touch spins my drives right 'round baby!

[eyoungren]

I have a Thermaltake BlacX Duet SATA dock. It's a great dock, but unknown to me when I bought it is the fact that these docks spin down their drives when inactive for a time.



I have been dealing with two drives constantly disconnecting. This is a problem when I am using at least one drive for Time Machine backups and none of my Macs can connect over the network or internet (yes, I do TM backups over the internet - I have my AFP port open through my router). But I finally figured out that the drives spinning down was the problem.

I had been using KeepDriveSpinning, which is an Applescript that "touches" a hidden file according to the number of seconds you set to keep the drive spinning.

KDS uses LaunchDaemons to do this. I decided to try and modify the daemons to see if I could make it work. Bad idea as I kept getting crashes and an unresponsive system.

However…since I knew touch was being used I took a look at the command today and I came up with what I think is a simple solution.

I have mentioned Lingon in the past. Lingon is a very cool app because it allows you to easily create LaunchDaemons to do just about ANYTHING. And one of those anythings is allowing you to execute terminal commands or applescripts based on criteria you set.

So, I made a small text file and I saved it invisibly on both of these two drives (by putting a period before the filename). I then created two launchdaemons using Lingon to execute a touch command every 30 seconds.

I do not know why KeepDriveSpinning is not working, but so far my two launchdaemons that I made myself are.

I'm going to keep testing, but so far it looks pretty good.

I love Lingon!

 

[happyfrappy]

Drive docks typically have their own idle timers vs enclosures so "KeepDriveSpinning" might be seeing an unsupported HDD bridge, most are designed for high-speed tasks(cloning). I don't use bare drive docks as many companies just rebrand/recase from different suppliers, if you run a toasty 1-2TB 7200 RPM drive for hours at a time there is greater odds of heat impacting chipset/SATA connector stability. As much as I don't trust Seagate products, their GoFlex/Backup Plus dock base was less prone to temp issues and you could use the Seagate GoFlex/Backup Plus tool to disable power management(idle spin down). The bare Seagate docks can be found for $10-15, there were third party HDD enclosures for non-Seagate drives.

If that WD drive is a WD Black it has a completely different firmware idle state than a WD Blue, newer dual-core 1TB revision for example while slightly slower than the previous model & single platter 1TB WD Blue has under-the-hood tweaks for he

 

[eyoungren]

Marking this as resolved. MBP is at work backing up over the net to my Quicksilver at home.

Looks like my simpler solution has worked.