Hard Disk Spins Down By Itself...

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I have a Power Mac G5, 2.3 GHz dual core, 2.5 GB memory, 250 GB hard disk. I notice that when I don't use my machine for some reasonably short period of time (half hour or so), the disk spins down autonomously. The computer isn't entering sleep, just the disk is spinning down. I know this is happening because I can hear it - a very recognizable sound!

This means that I sometimes have to wait while it spins back up when I go to use the machine again. More worrying though is that the constant spinning up and down is going to prematurely wear the drive. It is much less stressful to these mechanisms to just run continuously than to spin up and down multiple times a day.

Is there a place where I can disable this behaviour? I have checked my System Preferences, but have not found anything that would seem to be related to disk behaviour. Perhaps some magic Terminal command?

I have the system preferences Energy panel set to put the machine to sleep after 3 hours of inactivity, so I know that this is not the cause. It happens much faster than three hours and anyway, the machine is not going to sleep, just spinning down the drive.

Any and all pointers much appreciated. I am running OS X Tiger 10.4.6.
 
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What about the option under Energy Saver that says "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible"?
 
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Good choice. nonetheless, it is not checked, so that could not be the cause. I have to admit it would certainly seem to be behaving as if it was checked though...
 
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Hopefully it isn't a hardware-implemented feature by the motherboard or hard drive itself.
 
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Thanks all, an excellent and reasonable work around. Its too bad that there isn't an OS X way of controlling the spin down directly, but as someone pointed out, this could be a feature of the drive itself. A cron job that keeps it alive sounds perfect. Thanks again.
 

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