[johngrater]

This is essentially a bump of a very-old thread of the same name.

I have a Mac Pro with 4 drives installed. The OS is striped across the first two, which will never sleep (fine with that). The other two drives are storage for movies etc which I rarely access but are always running because drives 1&2 never sleep. It seems the "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option only puts internal disks to sleep if the whole controller is idle? I have used this option successfully on MacBook's with only one drive and on multiple external USB and firewire drives (as long as the drive is in the Spotlight Privacy list). This question is specifically in relation to the internal Mac Pro SATA drives.

My concern stems from the fact that 3&4 are directly above the graphics card and thus get very hot, running all the time, with my archived data on. I'd prefer they sleep while I'm not using them (the majority of the time), operating in the same manner as when they were previously external USB drives. Seems stupid to move them back out when I have such a huge case with slots available.

The drives are in the Spotlight Privacy list and no finder windows / tools are open that are accessing them.

I looked at Cocktail but this doesn't provide anything more than the Energy Saver preferences pane (in the drive sleep regard).

The SpindownHD utility in CHUD confirms all the drives are always Active, which I can also confirm by feeling their heat output, viewing their temps and the speed with which finder responds.

Thanks,
John

[AKcrab]

I don't have an answer for you, but I'm curious why you striped the first two drives.

[johngrater]

Just to try to maximise performance (I had a spare drive) as disk I/O is the bottleneck on the Pro.

But let's not get off-topic here...! :-)

[Simon]

You can unmount the drives and they will spin down. Use Disk Utility to remount a disk when you need it.

[johngrater]

Nice lateral thinking. That's a great simple solution! I'm always focused on the hardest way to solve a problem.

I put some applescript together and saved as an application in automator to make this a double-click:

Code:
on run {input, parameters}
	
	set vol to "example"
	tell application "Finder"
		if (exists disk vol) then
			do shell script "diskutil unmount /Volumes/" & vol
		else
			set device to do shell script "diskutil list |grep " & vol & " |awk '{print $6}'"
			do shell script "diskutil mount /dev/" & device
		end if
	end tell
	
	return input
end run

I'm still interested in why the drive sleep on a Mac Pro appears to be at the controller level though.

Thanks,
John

[carterx]

I have never thought of this before. For our editing machines at the college we used to have them set to not turn drives off because we used to have an issues with lag when the user went back to the desktop but this issue has gone away and we use the sleep option but would be a nice idea as you stated above to just spin down/sleep drives that are not in direct use.