External disk sleep

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I'm a new member, thanks for reading, glad to be here finally. I'm new to using macs within the past year, now I have four of them consequently.

Among those, I have a new 27" imac, and I have 3 external disks attached to it, both Firewire and USB. Every time I navigate anywhere (in Finder) where it displays the disks, it beach balls for 15 seconds while it spins up each disk, in order. The disks sleep within 20 minutes, the USB disk much less.

This is a little annoying. In the power saving options, I have disabled "sleep when possible". I have even changed the disksleep option in terminal to "0".

I didn't see this thread anywhere in searches, hope someone can help.

-BP
 
C

chas_m

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This may be a function of the disks themselves, if so there's not a lot you can do about it.
 
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One solution

I know one solution is to set up a cron job to copy a file to the disk every 10 minutes or so. I'd like to avoid doing that... I shouldn't need to do that, this is ridiculous to me.

I think you're right, I believe this may be a function of the disk. The manufacturers like Western Digital gave the users no control over sleep, and force the users to be "green".

As of late, WD has offered no firmware or management software to control the sleep functions of their drives, despite the many complaints. Even worse is my Hitachi drive, which sleeps after only FIVE MINUTES.

The question remains:
Should I be willing to sacrifice a few dollars per month, or even per year, for the many minutes in aggregate delays that this "savings" will cause?

Negative for me. I'll pay the $5-10 more per year to have a drive spin 24/7 when the computer is powered on. If I want to save money, I'll put my system on standby... Thanks
 
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Location
Lincoln Nebraska
Your Mac's Specs
late 08 macbook 2.0 4gig 320hdd10.7.3 32 gig iPhone 4s
I may be way off here but..How are the hdd's formated ? Because if they were HFS+ journaled then spotlight would be indexing them and that should keep them awake as long as they are mounted . At least thats what keeps both of my seagate 7200 'cudas from sleeping .


Just a thought
Clay
 

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