Auto-sleep hard drive?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Ok, so I got this Sonnet Tempo ATA100 card and this rather loud Western Digital 60GB 7200RPM drive to go with it...

Man, I never realized how quiet my system was before I installed this hard drive. This brings my total to 3 hard drives, and the WD 60GB I added is about to drive me nuts with how whiney it is! I have it set up to sleep hard drives at 30 minutes... and that works, since I rarely access that hard drive unless I'm cutting video or something... whine gone!

My question is this: is there any way to prevent this hard drive from spinning up at all until I actually access it? I'd bet that the spin-up at startup time, spin down 30 minutes later, then spin up again when I access it is probably doing more wear and tear damage on the drive than I need... so does anyone know how to make it NOT spin up at all until I need it? Thanks in advance!

[ElDiabloConCaca]

True, but I was thinking of moving the card and hard drive to the new Mac when I get it... I was thinking dual-1GHz, but then again, it takes money to buy one of those! I'm thinking with my NEXT upgrade (a 500MHz ZIF) I could keep this machine chugging along for at LEAST 2 years. It's been a damn good machine to me.

At any rate, I'll check around for some hard disk spin-down tools... I prefer not to have to type that much in the terminal unless I have to, and the noise isn't enough of a bother to go mucking around with the system files quite yet.

As of now, I've taken to sleeping the whole machine, then waking it up. It's a quick, painless process, and it keeps that drive spun down until I need it -- I'd still LOVE to do it automatically at boot-up time, but if I can't, oh well -- my little sleep workaround works for the time being.

Thanks for the terminal tips, though!

[ksv]

Back in the SCSI ages, you could just remove a spin-up jumper on the HD, and it wouldn't start up when you booted the machine

OK, but, my idea is, if you are the hardware moderator type, to find the minus (-) pin on the ATA cable and connect a switch to it which you make accessible from the ouside of the computer. Then the disk wouldn't get power, and of course it wouldn't spin up. So, if you were going to use the HD, you could just shut the computer down, toggle the switch and turn it on again. Eh?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Originally posted by ksv
So, if you were going to use the HD, you could just shut the computer down, toggle the switch and turn it on again. Eh?

Ummm... naah, I can stand the noise if I'm gonna have to shut down the computer, power on HD, then power on CPU to use the hard drive! I can manually sleep the whole system then wake it up, and that hard drive will stay sleeping until I need it...