Hard disks CONSTANTLY SLEEPING?

hey guys i installed an IDE hard disk into my mac, works perfectly. My computer is set to sleep afer 1 hour, however, if i walk away for about 15minutes the IDE drive sleeps. If im working at the computer its about an hour , maybe less.

I dont have "put hard disks to sleep whenever possible"

The only thing i worry, is the spinup/down wearing on the drive. Once or twice a day no biggie but cmon every time i take a break?

IIRC, theres a unix command for this, hdparm? does that work in osx? or even make a difference?

Thanks in advance.

what os are you running, and what are he specs of your mac?

Dual 1.8 ghz g5 power mac, Osx 3.9


i almost wanna say the overall system will not sleep too, common problem amongst macs, however if the second IDE drive is the cause i cant complain, as its not supported.

are you sure you set that second drive as slave?

i have that second drive on CSEL, as with the super drive. IDE80 cable is picky, the top must be the master, the bottom must be the slave. You can get data corruption messing with it, and i wont argue as ive had it happen. Ive had motherboards detect the drives ok, but data transfer could be slow, and when i worked with miniDV on 2 particular systems (gigabyte Ga-7DPXDW and Tyan S2460) i would end up with scrambled frames here and there, ATA speed warnings etc..

I cant see how the guys in the articles manage to stretch the IDE cable from the superdrive over to the hard drive, i cant find any here that long, and i heard cables at that length can be unstable.

yea, cable select shouldn't cause a problem, but have you tried making it a slave drive? in case? you say its not supported, did you format it before installing it? I have also heard that that IDE cables that are long are unstable, plus the fact that any kinks at all keep it from working correctly if at all, a longer cable would only be more possible to bend and kink IMO.

no i didnt try slave.. i only assumed it was unsupported simply because you dont see any apple upgrades for a second IDE, and the supplied IDE has support for 1 drive.