USB external disks spin-up

G

guyeva

Registered
I have 5 external USB disks on my little Mac Mini, and I've noted that if I don't access them for a time they spin down, and the next time I access them I have to wait for them to spin back up again. I don't care for that, and would rather they stayed spun up.

Is there some system setting or UNIX trick I can use to bring that about? Seems there should be? Anyone?

g.
 
In the "Energy Saver" pane of the System Preferences, uncheck "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible."

If that doesn't solve the problem, then the spin down/up function could be a part of the external hard drive itself. I, too, have 5 external hard drives connected to my Mac mini -- 1TB Western Digital Elements drives, and they have a power-saving function that is not controlled by the computer. They spin down after some time of inactivity, then need to spin up when accessed, causing a few seconds delay before the contents can be accessed.

There's nothing I can do about this.

What brand and model of external hard drive(s) are you using?
 
You could possibly have an Applescript running that would poll an external hard drive periodically to keep it 'live', but that might not be worth the effort with a large number of externals.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
In the "Energy Saver" pane of the System Preferences, uncheck "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible."

If that doesn't solve the problem, then the spin down/up function could be a part of the external hard drive itself. I, too, have 5 external hard drives connected to my Mac mini -- 1TB Western Digital Elements drives, and they have a power-saving function that is not controlled by the computer. They spin down after some time of inactivity, then need to spin up when accessed, causing a few seconds delay before the contents can be accessed.

There's nothing I can do about this.

What brand and model of external hard drive(s) are you using?
Click to expand...

Western Digital, so gosh, looks like maybe there's nothing I can do about it either. One of them, a 1tb drive came with some kind of Mac smarty software, but I've not been able to find anything in that to remedy the problem.

Well, I tried....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top