Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

cgc · May 5, 2007, 01:48 PM

I have two internal hard drives in my MacPro and would like to be able to set one to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity and another to sleep after 60 minutes, for example. The reason I'd like to do this is one hard drive is basically a backup drive and is only needed during my automated backups.

I checked Energy preference pane and only a setting for one drive but I remember having other options there under an older version of OS X. BTW, I'm using 10.4.9. Thanks.

frdmfghtr · May 5, 2007, 10:36 PM

CHUD will let you do what you want (I think)...make sure you read about it before trying it though.

Tools - Downloads

cgc · May 6, 2007, 10:23 AM

Thanks but I tried a bunch of the apps and nothing seems to do what I want. The SpinDownHD looked like it would but it doesn't allow setting each drive separately. I'll keep looking...

CharlesS · May 6, 2007, 12:43 PM

The thing about having your external drive spun down all the time is that it gets annoying when every time you bring up an Open dialog box, for example, it wants to ask the external drive what its icon is, and the whole UI pauses for a few seconds while you wait for the drive to spin back up.

cgc · May 6, 2007, 01:46 PM

That's not good news. I'm using Synk Pro to backup my Home directory every Sunday at 2am so I don't expect to use external much after that. I could leave it off but I'd prefer to have someway to keep external spun down except when Synk Pro needs to backup to it.

Are there any UNIX commands I can give to put drive to deep sleep where it will only wake when I give another UNIX command to wake?

cgc · May 6, 2007, 06:38 PM

I think the Mount command may do the trick but I'm not familiar with it. I'll play with it this week and post my results.

Anyone have any tips on using Mount to mount a Firewire drive named "Backup" and then dismount it later? Thanks.

JellyBeen · May 7, 2007, 07:41 AM

Try this out.
Do Something When - 1.2
Do Something When 1.2 – Mac OS X – VersionTracker

cgc · May 7, 2007, 10:28 AM

Originally Posted by JellyBeen

Try this out.
Do Something When - 1.2
Do Something When 1.2 – Mac OS X – VersionTracker

I have DSW but it won't enable/disable my drive. I actuall have DSW set up to call my Synk Pro script to scan and backup changed/deleted/added files from home folder to backup drive. I may just leave firewire drive off and turn it on every week. When it turns on it will mount and do an auto backup which is ok. I was hoping for a 100% automated backup, however...

CatOne · May 7, 2007, 11:39 AM

Originally Posted by cgc

That's not good news. I'm using Synk Pro to backup my Home directory every Sunday at 2am so I don't expect to use external much after that. I could leave it off but I'd prefer to have someway to keep external spun down except when Synk Pro needs to backup to it.

Are there any UNIX commands I can give to put drive to deep sleep where it will only wake when I give another UNIX command to wake?

Unmounting and mounting will enable this. Not sure if you use the mount command or an argument to disk utility, but it would be possible.

I'll leave the implementation as an exercise for the reader.

cgc · May 7, 2007, 05:06 PM

Thanks. I wonder if unmounting makes the drive go to sleep...

Goldfinger · May 7, 2007, 07:00 PM

Unmounting puts external drives to sleep. So I guess it's the same with internal drives.. ? theoretically..

cgc · 08:49 PM

I have discovered I can use the UNIX command DiskUtil (located in /usr/sbin/) to eject a drive (or mount it) but is there a way I can NOT enter an administrator password to do it?

Edit: Aha! Even better and without requiring a password is this gem: hdiutil eject diskname Diskname can be found using the terminal command df

One problem is remounting it requires an administrator password but I'll worry about that tomorrow.

Edit2: Doh! I prolly didn't need a password in the previous edit because it was still active from a previous sudo entry. Hdiutil requires a password...

CharlesS · May 8, 2007, 04:43 AM

Originally Posted by cgc

Edit2: Doh! I prolly didn't need a password in the previous edit because it was still active from a previous sudo entry. Hdiutil requires a password...

No, it doesn't...

cgc · 07:29 PM

It does for me (I blurred some info):

CharlesS · May 8, 2007, 08:01 PM

I think that's because you're trying to eject a partition (disk0s2). You can't eject a partition - you can only unmount it. You eject an entire disk. If you try using disk0 instead of disk0s2 with hdiutil, it should work without a password. It does on my machine, at least (whereas trying to eject the partition doesn't work even if I use sudo).

cgc · 09:21 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I think that's because you're trying to eject a partition (disk0s2). You can't eject a partition - you can only unmount it. You eject an entire disk. If you try using disk0 instead of disk0s2 with hdiutil, it should work without a password. It does on my machine, at least (whereas trying to eject the partition doesn't work even if I use sudo).

Interesting. I actually can eject my internal hard drive - it simply unmounts and spins down. I can also eject partitions. After my sudo expires in a few mins I'll try the unmount option.

Edit: Nope, still need to Authenticate. Are you sure you let your sudo expire because sudo lasts a minute or two (or more). Does it matter how the drive is formatted? Mine is HFS (Mac OS Extended Journaled). I have the permissions set to Ignore Permissions on this Volume, and Ownership/Permissions set to read/write.

cgc · 09:34 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I think that's because you're trying to eject a partition (disk0s2). You can't eject a partition - you can only unmount it. You eject an entire disk. If you try using disk0 instead of disk0s2 with hdiutil, it should work without a password. It does on my machine, at least (whereas trying to eject the partition doesn't work even if I use sudo).

I can eject a partition (/dev/disk1s3 Bootcamp) and a drive (/dev/disk0s2 Backup). BTW, /dev/disk0s2 is a drive with no partitions.

I have no idea how people are unmounting or ejecting drives without entering a password. Did you enter a password previously and it's still enabled? I cannot use hdiutil unmount, or umount, or diskutility unmountdisk, or hdiutil eject without having to authenticate. I am logged in as admin (hate to admit it).

CharlesS · May 8, 2007, 11:41 PM

Did you try hdiutil with /dev/disk0? That's all I'm doing, and it's working with no previous use of sudo or the Security framework. If it's not working for you, perhaps some binary that's supposed to have its setuid bit set doesn't? You could try Repair Permissions and see if it gets anything.

cgc · May 9, 2007, 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Did you try hdiutil with /dev/disk0? That's all I'm doing, and it's working with no previous use of sudo or the Security framework. If it's not working for you, perhaps some binary that's supposed to have its setuid bit set doesn't? You could try Repair Permissions and see if it gets anything.

That didn't work. I just moved my SATA drive out of my MacPro and into a FW800 enclosure and can mount/unmount at will without authenticating. It's still not possible to unmount an internal drive (or mount one) without a password.

CharlesS · May 9, 2007, 09:54 PM

That's really odd. It works for me with internal partitions as well as FireWire drives, no password.