[anti-sleep]

I'm pretty sure this is the most appropriate forum... if not, mods feel free to move or lock this thread.

My question is this: I have the energy saver in OS 10.3.6 set to put the hard disks to sleep when possible. Will this apply to my external Firewire 400 drive as well, and if so, is this a good idea? I can deal with the couple seconds of delay for the drive to spin back up.

Also, possible stipulation. The drive I'm using is a Western Digital 3.5" in the Macally PHR-100AC enclosure. After updating to 10.3.6 the drive was no longer visible anywhere but in the System Profiler, but I installed updated firmware from Macally and everything seems to be working just fine. Would this change the sleep behavior at all?

Thank you in advance to anyone who replies.

[SSharon]

if by sleep you mean spin down then yes it should. All of my external hard drives spin down when I leave them on but I usually unmount them and power them off.

[f1000]

I have an Iogear ION FW/USB2 enclosure that never spins down, so I dismount it and power it down when I'm not using it.

[anti-sleep]

Thanks for the info you two.

[brickcam]

there are a few other threads in this forum about this same issue. External hd sleep behavior appears to be regulated by the enclosure; some sleep, mine for example does not (PHR100AF) as far as I can tell. There are some unix commands like hdparm which ostensibly would be able to force a spindown. Your system preferences would not affect the external drive's behavior.

[SSharon]

if its based on the enclosure let me add that I have a coolmax with the oxford 911 chipset and this one that uses some other chipset.