[exsilio]

Hey all,

I have a 2nd HD installed in my PowerMac MDD 1.25.

And it is always spnning down. Which of course creates lag when it needs to spin up for activity...is there anyway to not allow it to sleep?

Thanks in advance.

[bradoesch]

Look in the Energy Saver preference pane. There should be a check box that says "spin down disks when possible" or something like that. Uncheck it (it should be checked right now.)

[exsilio]

Thanks for he tip, but I already did that. I think it only affects the drive your system folder is on. The 2nd hard drive still spins down.

Any other ideas out there?

[Orion27]

I use this: Spin Down fix. Try it and let us know if it works:http://www.macmaps.com/software.html#spindown

[BrunoBruin]

Wow, I'm glad someone asked this as I have the same issue and it's driving me bonkers. The worst part of it is, the drive usually decides to spin up just when I'm trying to show someone something, and we have to wait five seconds while the Finder clears its throat. Not a very good impression of the speed of OS X!

[Camelot]

Assuming you're running Mac OS X, you can also fix this using a very simple cron task to touch a dummy file on disk every 5 minutes. The touch is sufficient to make the system think the disk is active and therefore won't spin down:

*/5 * * * * touch /Volumes/<volname>/.nosleep

obviously, substitute your volume name for <volname>, and you can use any file name where I've used ".nosleep".

[gee308]

To all those people who don't speak unix, what you just said came out to some thing like:
DJAsljldaskldjas lkd asdjkhas dkjasdj alksd
akldjalksdj Mac os x aslkdj aslkdjasldj aasda
volumes askjdasld alkdjasljd a
file adsjkdhalsd jalskdjla djdummy dummy askdja lkdjasld jasldjasdja ksldasldjk
touch a dummy as;ldasl dkalsdjl ajdalskj dlasjd lasjd asdjasl djsald jasldj ladja aa dummy touch me back ajhksdkahdkashda

Originally posted by Camelot:
Assuming you're running Mac OS X, you can also fix this using a very simple cron task to touch a dummy file on disk every 5 minutes. The touch is sufficient to make the system think the disk is active and therefore won't spin down:

*/5 * * * * touch /Volumes/<volname>/.nosleep

obviously, substitute your volume name for <volname>, and you can use any file name where I've used ".nosleep".

[Camelot]

Originally posted by gee308:
To all those people who don't speak unix, what you just said came out to some thing like:

I'm sorry it was above your comprehension level.

[gee308]

Please, I wasn't talking about me, I was talking about normal mac users.

My crontab :

*/30 * * * * /usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q

0 * * * * /usr/bin/newsyslog

30 1 * * * /bin/sh /etc/daily 2>&1 | tee /var/log/daily.out | mail -s "`/bin/hos
tname` daily output" root
30 3 * * 6 /bin/sh /etc/weekly 2>&1 | tee /var/log/weekly.out | mail -s "`/bin/h
ostname` weekly output" root
30 5 1 * * /bin/sh /etc/monthly 2>&1 | tee /var/log/monthly.out | mail -s "`/bin
/hostname` monthly output" root
0 * * * * /usr/libexec/spamd-setup

0 * * * * /usr/sbin/ddclient -daemon=0 -quiet
btw, touching a file on the 2nd drive is a pretty good idea.

Originally posted by Camelot:
I'm sorry it was above your comprehension level.

[exsilio]

Well I certainly appreciate everyones help.

Orions tip seems to have done the trick however!

Thanks again.

[LightWaver-67]

This may be "obvious", but have you RESTARTED since setting the Energy Saver control panel...? I founf that for my EXTERNAL drives, you need to restart the machine for changes to take effect or if you unplug and replug a FireWire drive, for some reason it ignores the setting until you reboot.

Now... this may not help you at all, but I thought I'd give it a shot.