[bluehz]

I know that the whole HD spindown issue has been discussed before with RE: to OS 10.1.x. My issue is a bit unusual in that I have 3 HD mounted in my G4/400 - I continuously hear one of them in particular spindown about every 5 mins and immediately spin back up again. Rather disconcerting - not to mention it can slow things down. Anyone have any ideas what is going on? Note the HD IMMEDIATELY spins back up after spinning down.

[Cipher13]

Check your energy saver settings... it might be telling the boot drive to spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity or whatever, though it shouldn't ever as long as VM is being utilised...

The OSX Energy Saver is funky. Could be that, or it could be an ATA controller issue...

[bluehz]

The Energy Saver was my first guess. It is actually set on about 30 mins.

Does the Energy Saver only control the startup disk?

[BatmanPPC]

Originally posted by bluehz:
<STRONG>I know that the whole HD spindown issue has been discussed before with RE: to OS 10.1.x. My issue is a bit unusual in that I have 3 HD mounted in my G4/400 - I continuously hear one of them in particular spindown about every 5 mins and immediately spin back up again. Rather disconcerting - not to mention it can slow things down. Anyone have any ideas what is going on? Note the HD IMMEDIATELY spins back up after spinning down.</STRONG>

Note that this is probably an indication that the hard drive is about to croak. The ATA controller is getting errors from the hard drive and is resetting. This isnt the definitive answer but that's what I've seen with dying hard drives on some linux boxes.

What model drives do you have?