Can't spin down TM HDD!?

Good day all!

Here's the issue, got me a new internal 750GB HDD the other week to use as the TM HDD. So I "installed" the HDD, set up TM and let it go about its business. All is good! The issue I'm having is, the TM HDD will NOT stay spun down. I.E. it will do the back up on the hour, spin down when its done the back up and in a few minuets its spins back up again and it just keeps doing this every five minuets over and over again. This wouldn't bother me if the TM HDD was really quite, but its not. In the system prefs I have the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" on. There is nothing but the back up on this drive. So is there a way to "force" that HDD to sleep/ spin down? Is there some script I could run to make it do this? Any help or ideas would be great!

Thanks all!

One of the features of Time Machine is that it backs up every hour. I think there's a way to decrease the frequency of the backups, but I'll let somebody else pipe in with those details as I'm fairly certain it involves using the Terminal.

As for it spinning up every five minutes, that's quite odd.

Yes there is a way to change the frequency of the back ups, its with a program called "TimeMachineEditor". This allows you to set what time you can back up to HDD"X".

What I understand you are trying to say is you want your hard drive to spin down when not being used, but not decrease the frequency of the back ups.
I use an external drive and it spins down straight away as soon as it finishes back up!
What I'd suggest is open the disk utility & try unmounting the Time Machine Drive & then try Mounting it back on after an hour, if it works seamlessly with time machine then all you need to do is create a little script which will mount & unmount your time machine drive every hour automatically!
Hope that makes sense..
Cheers..

Thanks for your help "umang7888". I have no idea how to create a script so after a bit of digging around looking for "mount/ unmount" on an internal HDD I found "Time Machine Scheduler" Which allows you to change the intervals at which TM runs and has an auto mount/ unmount feature to. So I'll let you know if it works. You can fine the program here> http://www.klieme.com/TimeMachineScheduler.html

All the best.

Nop! Didn't work! So, can some one tell me how to wright a script that will mount/ unmount the HDD that I ue for the back up. For example. On boot backup spin down/ unmount. one hour later mount the backup HDD, do TM backup and the unmount. Step and repeat. And because I have never done it before... I will need my hand held on this.

Thanks all!

with the terminal-command "pmset" you can force the internal hard drive to keep spinning.

example:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0

0 means disable, if you write 12 it will last 12 minutes before spindown

maybe it will work for an external hard drive as well? If not, take a look at Apples CHUD-tool. It can handle external hard drives as well.