Caffeine for disk drives?

June 9, 2006 12:29 PM

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.

posted by StarForce5 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Cocktail will let you set the spindown on external drives. You can also use a cron job to manipulate a file on the external drive every four minutes, fifty-nine seconds.
posted by Mr. Six at 12:48 PM on June 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

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

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

Does OS X use hdparm like other unix systems? My OSX install is dead at the moment, or I'd be more helpful.
posted by odinsdream at 3:12 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