macOS Can someone make...Anti-Spindown Widget/Program/whatever

[northernmunky]

I use several WD MyBook hard drives for my editing projects.... great drives with just one hassle.. they keep spinning down after 10minutes and theres no way to turn it off and naturally I always need to access it at the 10minutes and 5 seconds mark.

Looking around I can only see some scripts to solve the problem but with the absence of programming skills I'm calling upon someone who could perhaps write one eh? Maybe as a widget or something? How hard can it be?

Can anyone turn something like this into an app?
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011024160033481

 

[Cromulent]

I use several WD MyBook hard drives for my editing projects.... great drives with just one hassle.. they keep spinning down after 10minutes and theres no way to turn it off and naturally I always need to access it at the 10minutes and 5 seconds mark.

Looking around I can only see some scripts to solve the problem but with the absence of programming skills I'm calling upon someone who could perhaps write one eh? Maybe as a widget or something? How hard can it be?

Can anyone turn something like this into an app?
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011024160033481

Energy Saver system preference. Untick "Put the hard drives to sleep whenever possible". Does that work?

 

[northernmunky]

Energy Saver system preference. Untick "Put the hard drives to sleep whenever possible". Does that work?

No, the drive is external and independent of the OS

 

[Cromulent]

No, the drive is external and independent of the OS

If it was independent of the OS it wouldn't work .

 

[italiano40]

cron jobs are easy to use and this tip
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...11024160033481
explains it great
and cron jobs would do a better job than a widget
so i would use the cron job instead of a widget or a full program

 

[Windsor Smith]

Energy Saver system preference. Untick "Put the hard drives to sleep whenever possible". Does that work?

No, the drive is external and independent of the OS

If it was independent of the OS it wouldn't work .

I had the same problem with the internal Hitachi Deskstar disks in my Power Mac G5, and unchecking "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" didn't work for me either. Eventually I learned that some hard disk drives have an internal setting that causes them to spin down independently of anything the OS tells them to do. Many years ago you could use utilities like FWB Hard Disk Toolkit to change those internal settings, but I haven't found anything that works on today's drives -- at least not for Mac OS X.

By shear coincidence, I started experimenting with Mac software development (using Cocoa) just a few days ago, and "Hard Disk Caffeine" is already near the top of my list of possible projects. (I'm a software engineer and system administrator with extensive experience in C/Unix, but not much with Cocoa yet.) I'll research it a little more and let y'all know if I'm able to give this function a suitable GUI. Meanwhile, I'll continue to monitor this thread, so please post a note if you find that someone has already come up with another solution that you like better than the 'cron' approach.

Speaking of the 'cron' approach, you might want know that the 'cronoff' command mentioned at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011024160033481 will remove all of the user's 'crontab' entries, not just the 'Activate' entry. Chances are, most people won't have anything else in their 'crontab' anyway, but as a general solution it's a bit sloppy.

 

[northernmunky]

By shear coincidence, I started experimenting with Mac software development (using Cocoa) just a few days ago, and "Hard Disk Caffeine" is already near the top of my list of possible projects. (I'm a software engineer and system administrator with extensive experience in C/Unix, but not much with Cocoa yet.) I'll research it a little more and let y'all know if I'm able to give this function a suitable GUI. Meanwhile, I'll continue to monitor this thread, so please post a note if you find that someone has already come up with another solution that you like better than the 'cron' approach.

Brilliant, I think there's a need for it... I like this hard drive but I'm worried the stress that's being put on it by continuously spinning up and down all the time is going to shorten its life. I'll try this 'cron' thing but I'm very weary about running code on my laptop when I don't really know what its doing which is why I've been looking for an app that's already been written to do the job.

 

[northernmunky]

Just to update, I foud a thread that had another way to solve the problem... some kind of terminal command that 'touches' a file.

Hopefully this will make more sense to someone here...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/298694/