[brza]

pmset is used to modify power management settings. Last night I entered:
$sudo pmset reduce 1 spindown 10

by my understanding: this should reduce the CPU speed and, in 10 minutes of inactivity, spin down the hard drive.

I left the computer but was closeby and could continually hear something spin down and back up every couple of minutes. I believe it was the CPU because I didn't want this to continuelike this so I put "reduce" back to zero and left the spindown in effect. I didn't hear anything starting and stopping every couple minutes.

My question is why would thisbe happening? Even if it was the hard drive, I had no programs open that were writing to the disk. All that was open was an idle MSN client, a browser sitting on one page and the terminal. No much of a power managemer if the cpu or hard drive is constantly going on and off...

[n1mie]

Originally Posted by brza

pmset is used to modify power management settings. Last night I entered:
$sudo pmset reduce 1 spindown 10

by my understanding: this should reduce the CPU speed and, in 10 minutes of inactivity, spin down the hard drive.

Take a look at:

Code:
$ man pmset

I don't see a 'spindown' option such as you type it. I think what you should have done was:

Code:
$ sudo pmset reduce 1 disksleep 10

Actually on second thought as I re-read it again, I see that disksleep replaced spindown in OS 10.4. So if you're in OS 10.4 try disksleep. If you are not in OS 10.4 then I have no idea. Try giving the command in pieces (either reduce OR spindown) and see what happens. Also, why not use the graphical interface (preference pane)?

Good luck,
--Chip