[Sherwin]

I've got a couple of external Firewire HDs (LaCie) hanging off the back of a Mac.
One of the drives has developed a squeal when it's been running for a long time - so I have the option in Prefs/Energy Saver for "put HDs to sleep" checked. This sorts the problem but creates another one...
...I'm running my home folder on another Firewire HD (actually, two configured as RAID) - and the pause between me touching the computer and the drives spinning up to working speed is annoying me. I figure that if the 'time to sleep" was longer, it wouldn't be a problem.

So, the question...
Is there any way of altering the time the computer waits between last user action and HD spin-down?

10.2.8


Thanks guys.

[chabig]

I don't think you can change it. But I wouldn't worry about. I'd worry about backing up the data that's on the failing drive and getting it replaces ASAP.

Chris

[Big Mac]

pmset is the command line tool for the power manager; it contains provisions for setting spin-down times for your drives. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to set preferences for individual drives.

[Sherwin]

Originally posted by chabig:
I don't think you can change it.

Arh. OK.

Originally posted by chabig:
But I wouldn't worry about. I'd worry about backing up the data that's on the failing drive and getting it replaces ASAP.

It's actually the temp backup drive that's squealing, so no biggie about losing data off it. It's more the noise it's making that's annoying me. I suppose I could just unmount it until it's time to use it.

Hmmm... Off to the unix forum to ask about doing a mount/unmount from a cron job.


Thanks anyway Chris.

[Sherwin]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
pmset is the command line tool for the power manager; it contains provisions for setting spin-down times for your drives. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to set preferences for individual drives.

I don't need it for individual drives - just wanted to pump the whole lot up to about a half hour (which will take care of any slight breaks) instead of the minute or two (guessed, and exaggerated for emphasis) it's at right now.

I'm reading the man page for pmset right now. Looks like what I need.

Excellent stuff. Thanks!

[SMacTech]

The drive spin down time is held in a plist file. It can be modified, as there are utilities that do it. I will try to find the correct plist file to modify and post back.

The file is located in Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/
the file is com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

There is a disk sleep timer key in that file. Looks like the default or the setting on mine is 180, which I assume is seconds to spin down.

[Big Mac]

Great, glad to have helped. Remember that you have to run pmset with sudo.

[Sherwin]

Job done. For reference:

Code:
sudo pmset -a spindown 30

Thanks guys.


I'm still interested in the following though - it'd be useful to know.

Originally posted by SMacTech:
The drive spin down time is held in a plist file. It can be modified, as there are utilities that do it. I will try to find the correct plist file to modify and post back.

[SMacTech]

The file is located in Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/
the file is com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

[Sherwin]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
The file is located in Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/
the file is com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

No such folder, no such file.

Closest I can get to anything sounding like that is:
/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/PowerManagement.bundle/Contents/

Contents:

info.plist
version.plist
MacOS (directory).

In the "MacOS" directory above there's just an executable named "PowerManagement".

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Sherwin:
No such folder, no such file.

Closest I can get to anything sounding like that is:
/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/PowerManagement.bundle/Contents/

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist exists on my system too. You could try creating it if it's not there. (Make sure you're looking in /Library and not /System/Library, by the way. Some folks get mixed up.)

EDIT: If you do indeed need to create the file, here is what you should need to put in it:

Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>AC Power</key>
	<dict>
		<key>Disk Sleep Timer</key>
		<integer>180</integer>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Where 180 is the number of minutes until the disk sleeps.

That's how it appears to be on my system, anyway.