[badtz]

I have a powerbook with an external firewire HD.

I have the "Put Hard Disk to sleep when possible." checked in the energy saver.

The firewire drive contains my music, videos.

My HD would have to spin up everytime I decide to play music and or a video after it falls to sleep.


Would having this checked harm my drive? Or should I un-check it so that it keeps on spinning all the time?


thanks

[OreoCookie]

Nope. Especially if you have a notebook drive. Generally. SCSI drives have the least spin-up spin-down spec whereas notebook hds have the highest. Reason is simple: the different needs.

But your hd should be totally ok with that. No reason to switch that off.

[badtz]

everytime it falls to sleep, it would take a couple seconds for it to spin-back up before I can play my music/video that's located on the drive.

It's a 3.5" drive, not a notebook ........



this won't cause additional wear to the drive?

[CIA]

This is an age old question....
I prefer to leave my drives running all the time. yes, it's a little louder in my room, but it seems that's a small price to pay for less wear and tear on my drive.
I'm sure other people will tell you different.

[Mac Zealot]

as a friend said once, "when the thing spins down all hell breaks loose"

Basically, I take this as an example, some place loaded with servers, one day the power goes out and the UPS fails, and a machine that was never turned off and had been running for like 10 years had hard drive failures left and right.

Hard drives are a back and fourth thing, on a laptop you want to keep it between what's safe for the drive and good for the battery. Remember though, spinning up and down hard drives eats up battery power.

On a desktop drive, I'd say keep the thing spun up as long as you plan to use it, then let it go to sleep, if you get the idea, desktop hard drives are made to sit running and being used maybe 4 hours at a time, then sleeping, or etc.

Either that or used 24/7.. I haven't let the HD in this computer be off for more then 30 minutes in months.

Then again, that's because I use the machine as a server lol.