Disable Internal Hard Disk

I have a PPC Mac Mini, and I am running Tiger off of an external hdd because it is much faster and has much more storage space.

Is there a way that I can disable the internal hdd? I would like to be able to shut it off and leave it shut off, until I re-enable it. So far, I have just been unmounting it every time I boot up.

I don't think you can..
Why would you want to?
I guess if you are desperate you can open the mini and unplug it.

PowerBookG4 said:

I don't think you can..
Why would you want to?
I guess if you are desperate you can open the mini and unplug it.

Click to expand...

There doesn't seem to be a point to keeping it running if it is not being used. It woud just create heat and wear out the drive.

In Linux and Windows, hardware devices can be disabled, so I figured that the same could be done in OS X. Perhaps I should research how Unix handles this.