Caffeine for disk drives?
June 9, 2006 12:29 PM Subscribe
On a Mac G4 system, OSX Tiger, how do I stop my external firewire drives from going to sleep whenever I step away from the machine for more than a 5 minutes?
I have two fairly new external firewire drives, a Maxtor and Seagate connected eachother and then to the G4 firewire port. Both disks are HFS formatted with lots of files.
If I step away from the machine for more than 5 minutes then one or both drives will go to sleep or more like a coma. Trying to browse the drives in Finder after they go to sleep is just asking to stare at a spinning beachball of death for 5 minutes or more.
I played with the power management settings in system settings but doesn't seem to have any affect on this issue.
I have two fairly new external firewire drives, a Maxtor and Seagate connected eachother and then to the G4 firewire port. Both disks are HFS formatted with lots of files.
If I step away from the machine for more than 5 minutes then one or both drives will go to sleep or more like a coma. Trying to browse the drives in Finder after they go to sleep is just asking to stare at a spinning beachball of death for 5 minutes or more.
I played with the power management settings in system settings but doesn't seem to have any affect on this issue.
Are you sure your computer is configured correctly? I have 2 external firewire drives and they come out of sleep pretty much instantaneously.
posted by dobbs at 1:11 PM on June 9, 2006
posted by dobbs at 1:11 PM on June 9, 2006
Response by poster: dobbs: I have no idea. Some external drives wake up immediately on this machine, other go comatose.
Mr.Six: Thanks. The word you clued me into is "spindown"
posted by StarForce5 at 1:17 PM on June 9, 2006
Mr.Six: Thanks. The word you clued me into is "spindown"
posted by StarForce5 at 1:17 PM on June 9, 2006
System Preferences >> Energy Saver...
Uncheck the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" box. You may also want to adjust the "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:" slider.
posted by sluggo at 5:37 PM on June 10, 2006
Uncheck the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" box. You may also want to adjust the "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:" slider.
posted by sluggo at 5:37 PM on June 10, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Mr. Six at 12:48 PM on June 9, 2006 [1 favorite]