[angelmb]

Besides setting up to put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible with System Preferences…

I have four internal HDs inside my MDD and want them to sleep when there is not activity requested from them. I guess System Preferences's Energy Saver option would be OK, albeit an unlucky translation to spanish makes me wonder… they talk only about one hard disk, well, not even that, actually is just 'disk' (but it is a given we are talking about a hard disk here) while running OS X with english as default language it says 'hard disk(s)'.

I have tried it with the Developers Tools app dubbed 'SpinDown HD' but no hard disk is shown…

I have also tried SleeplessHD but since its purpose is to keep them running I am not sure if just selecting the boot hard disk is going to serve this purpose.

A menu item displaying the HDs and its current state would be rather cool thought…

[mduell]

Originally Posted by angelmb 

how to tell if a hard disk is really asleep?

Touch it.

[angelmb]

I wish that would be the way to know it… but hey are not that silent !!, so Mark, would you mind letting me know which one is a really silent ATA HD these days?, thanks.

Mac update estimates: MacBook Pro Jan/Feb 08 (2.6Ghz 45nm); MacBook 2Q08 (2.4Ghz 65nm); Mac Pro yesterday (all quad 45nm); iMac 2Q08 (2.6/3.0Ghz 45nm); Mac mini 2Q08 (2.4Ghz 65nm); Xserve imminent (all quad 45nm).

That's your funniest signature to date

[mduell]

Originally Posted by angelmb 

I wish that would be the way to know it… but hey are not that silent !!, so Mark, would you mind letting me know which one is a really silent ATA HD these days?, thanks.

A little damping material goes a long way... the Hitachi T7K500 series are pretty quiet, but if you need a bigger drive the new WD 'variable speed' drives (which, from the benchmarks I've seen, are just 5400RPM drives) are pretty quiet because they're slower.

Originally Posted by angelmb 

That's your funniest signature to date

Seriously. I thought about changing it to 3Q08 (Nehalem release), but that might actually encourage someone to buy the current deprecated models.

[angelmb]

Excuse me Mark, but is that Hitachi the same model linked below?

Newegg.com - HITACHI Deskstar T7K500 HDT725050VLA360 (0A33437) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Cause that's a SATA drive while my Power Mac is PATA, maybe you misread my 'silent ATA' as serial ATA, my fault I had to write Parallel ATA.

The reviews on the PATA Hitachi's are kinda discouraging, I know I know… there is not a single product with a failure rate = 100

As for size… those come only as 500 GB model!? LOL @ my internal storage… which is a mere 80 GB SEAGATE Barracuda 7200 rpm.

Thanks for your input.

[mduell]

The T7K500 series (which comes in 250-500GB sizes) is supposed to be available in ATA133 and SATA, but the ATA version may be hard to find (people still use those ribbon cables? probably have a zip drive too you monkey).

I haven't seen (or honestly even looked) for reviews of ATA drives in the last... 3 years. Try poking around storagereview.com and see if you find anything.

I thought you had four internal hard drives? Anyway, anything under 500GB is uninteresting these days.

[angelmb]

Thanks again for your advice and yes, I had four internal drivers, seagate barracuda all them (80+80+80+160) as sizes, but in my quest to make my MDD the quietest possible I ended removing three of them and setting up the power supply fans to work with 5v. instead of 12v. then I replaced the big 120mm. CP fan with a silent newer one, so at last I have a really quiet MDD, I guess I have to change his computer name from Wind Tunnel to something else, Speed Holes would do it.

[Kenneth]

Originally Posted by angelmb 

I have tried it with the Developers Tools app dubbed 'SpinDown HD' but no hard disk is shown…

That's really strange. Do you see any optical drive list as well?

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by Kenneth 

That's really strange. Do you see any optical drive list as well?

This is what I can see… a.k.a. nothing at all



Anyway I don't need it any longer since I have took three of four internal hard disk out of the MDD, but even so I wonder why the remaining one is not being shown. I have two internal optical drives but I am not sure they would must be listed there.

[Kenneth]

very odd. I just fired up Spindown HD 4.5 under 10.5.1, it didn't show anything; however it worked under 10.4.10. Looks like it's broken under Leopard.

[angelmb]

Thanks for giving it a try Kenneth.