SpindownHD
I hate waiting for disks to spin up, but at the same time I don't want them to be running constantly when I'm not at the computer, especially with someone like a laptop... has a penchant for kicking the fan on. Having "spin down hard drive when possible" checked can save you some heat.
So you'll be sitting there working away, and go to save something. *wwwRRRRR* For some reason, the OS decides it needs to awaken every single drive connected to the computer, and in my normal setup I have a whole bunch of firewire drives connected. That'd be annoying, but not a big deal, as a HD doesn't take that long to spin up... except it does it sequentially.
IE, first drive wirs up, then it sees the second and wakes that up, and eventually you're hanging out for 5 seconds waiting to be able to save your document. It's not really long enough to multitask to something else, but long enough to really crimp your style. Carbon apps seem especially prone to it...
I found some .plist setting you can modify, but it wasn't something I really wanted to mess with. But if you have the developer tools installed on 10.3, under:
/Developer/Applications/Performance\ Tools/CHUD/Hardware\ Tools/
...you'll see a nifty little app called SpindownHD. It's not really well documented at all, really, not even through googling. But it seems close to what I'd want. You can modify the default sleep time, as well as change the polling frequency, but I can't really seem to get that to stick. It also doesn't show all the drives connected for some reason. Weird.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 17, 2004, at 09:21 AM
Comments (2)
Posted by: drunkenbatman at February 26, 2004 05:19 AM
Brilliant! As for why i didnt' do it, well, I didn't know about it. ;)
Still though, that just solves them not spinning down at all... I'd much rather it be smarter about what needs to be spun up, and when. IE, there's no need to fire up every single damn drive just because i am opening a file on the local drive, or saving to it.
that checkbox means "spin the disks down in 10 minutes"
why don't you try setting a 20 minute spindown timer?
sudo pmset -a spindown 20