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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Notebooks > Do hard drives constantly spin?

Do hard drives constantly spin?
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kmarketing
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Apr 20, 2004, 01:56 AM
 
Hi,

Just wondering...

Do laptop hard drives spin constantly or do they stop and then spin up whenever necessary?

I was told by a friend that they constantly spin, but I thought otherwise. I just wanted to get your thoughts.

Thanks!!
     
Cellery
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Apr 20, 2004, 02:17 AM
 
If they're busy reading/writing data, then the drives will constantly spin. However, you can set it so that the drive stops after a certain period of inactivity.
     
kmarketing  (op)
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Apr 20, 2004, 07:50 AM
 
Hi,

Is it bad for the drive if it is constantly spinning? And how do you set the spinning?

Thanks!!
     
SSharon
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Apr 20, 2004, 09:10 AM
 
Well its bad if its spinning and doing nothing, then its just wasting energy and making things hot. Check out the energy saver pref pane in the system prefs, there is a check box for 'put the hard disk to sleep when possible'. The only downside is that the drive will have to spin back up before things can be read/written so you can experience a 2 second delay while it spins up before a file saves or app launches.
Hope that helps.
     
amazing
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Apr 20, 2004, 03:54 PM
 
Since I've got a Ti-400 (where I can spin the HD down in OS 9), I can tell you that X spins up the HD almost constantly, it's extremely rare that the HD will spin down. It was one of the first things I noticed when I went to X from 9. I kept wondering what the extra noise was in X, and I finally realized that the HD was spinning all the time.

In OS 9, you can use the control strip to spin down the HD, which is how I confirmed what the extra noise in X was about. In X you can use Cocktail to specify how much idle time before the HD spins down. I believe that X specifies 10 minutes of idle before the HD spins down, and some VM process or other insures that never happens (or extremely rarely.)

I once used Cocktail to set the spin down at 1 minute, and it spun up again almost instantly. Needless to say, the up and down isn't good for the HD, so I reset it to default.
     
SSharon
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Apr 20, 2004, 03:57 PM
 
maybe thats the case with laptops but with my MDD the hard drives always spin down. I come back to my computer use it for a few minutes and then when I launch an unopen app it pauses and I hear it spin up. strange. how much ram do u have, maybe my MDD just caches everything.
     
kmarketing  (op)
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Apr 20, 2004, 04:06 PM
 
Is it bad if it spins constantly?

Does that mean the hard drive will have more problems in the future?

Thanks!!
     
Luca Rescigno
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Apr 20, 2004, 04:08 PM
 
I wish you could set a time delay for when the hard drives spin down. It gets annoying when I'm reading a post for three minutes and they spin down and have to spin up when I want to click a link or something. But I would like it to spin down after, say, ten minutes, if I'm watching a movie or something.

"That's Mama Luigi to you, Mario!" *wheeze*
     
SSharon
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Apr 20, 2004, 04:12 PM
 
I don't think its a huge problem if the hard drive doesn't spin down assuming you turn the machine off once in a while. Driving a car for 12 hours straight every day won't necessarily kill it if you turn it off overnight (and properly maintain it).
     
ibook_steve
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Apr 20, 2004, 04:28 PM
 
The most strain on a hard drive is when it starts and stops spinning. This has been a question and issue on the Tivo forums for a long time. In a Tivo, the hard drive (or drives) spins all the time because it is constantly recording live TV. Many people get nervous about this. However, there is a lot more strain on the motor when spinning is started and stopped a lot. In a laptop situation, stopping the hard drive is good for power savings. Unfortunately, with an OS like OS X which needs the hard drive constantly available for virtual memory, it's not often possible to stop the drive.

Steve
     
Luca Rescigno
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Apr 20, 2004, 05:45 PM
 
I was just thinking it might put less strain on the hard drive to simply spin down every night when I go to bed. I want to keep the computer on, though, because I crunch RC5 with the distributed.net client 24/7. I guess the only option is to check the option in System Prefs every time I go to bed, and uncheck it when I get up.

"That's Mama Luigi to you, Mario!" *wheeze*
     
tie
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Jun 8, 2005, 02:01 PM
 
Is there any way to force the hard drive to spin down? My hard drive never goes to sleep, except just before the computer itself goes to sleep, when I finally enjoy a few blessed moments of silence. I am running 10.4, PB 12". With 1.25 GB RAM, I feel the hard disk should sometimes be able to sleep. But it never ever does, even though I have checked the appropriate checkbox in Energy Saver.

I tried running fs_usage to see if there was a particular problem, but didn't really notice anything. Here are the statistics from top, which I don't really know how to interprate:
Code:
PhysMem: 134M wired, 655M active, 402M inactive, 1.16G used, 87.8M free VM: 10.2G + 144M 131835(0) pageins, 53047(0) pageouts
Edit: Here is a related thread. I am hearing a whir, not a tick sound. A few people seem to have found solutions -- including e.g. disconnecting from the internet -- a few people couldn't get anything to work. I'll try a few of them, and see if there is any progress.
     
   
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