ibook hard drive SPIN DOWN

redkite

Registered
Can I have a rant please !

Is there a system hack that will allow the hard drive of my ibook (with OS 10.2) to spin down after 30 secs or whatever if no input is made (it never does - well maybe after 10 minutes for 20 seconds!!) This is so annoying, even if your just reading something on the screen that you know is in memory, it keeps spinning away ! - in OS 9 you could choose spin down from the energy saver control strip module and have some peace. I know Cocktail does this but I'm not paying for something like that and its not user controllable either lol

I've never, ever seen anyone complain about this before so I'm going too !

Someone for fks sake create a mini free app to spin the hard drive down on ibooks / powerbooks!! Theres about a million time management applications and image editing shareware etc on the apple downloads pages. come on this is really needed. It annoyed me from day one when I installed OS X.
 
Even with that option turned on, the harddrive rarely sleeps. This is because a UN*X based system often has to 'do' things. While you (the user) might only be watching a webpage or a TextEdit document, the system (and many, let's say, virtual users) are doing what they ought to do.

Apple has done a great job bringing these things down to a minimum. Battery life has increased from release to release of Mac OS X (power management was basically absent in the Public Beta and has much improved from 10.0 through to 10.3.3).

Mac OS 9 is clearly the winner in this game, but OS 9 is dead. Steve Jobs has taken it to the grave. We got many advantages with OS X, energy management is not one of those.
 
My hard drive must be getting really tired !!

I feel sorry for it.

Jason the energy saver option does nothing; just dims the screen then turns it off. That bit works OK. It span the hard drive down once after about 20/30 mins - I just watched it to see what would happen. It never sleeps the hard drive if you are using any input device. It also won't send the whole ibook to sleep after ANY length of time.

Maybe someone knows a tweak to the system. I had Cocktail installed (but the demo has expired) and that managed to get the hard drive to sleep after about 1 minute for variable lengths of time. Therefore there must be a setting somewhere that can be altered..
 
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