"the problem i have is KEEPING the mini asleep...i use a BT kb with it, but it seems every BT device in the house will wake it up. The mirrored seagate drives (at least one of them) also seems to hang up a lot and prevent the system from going to sleep."
The disk manufacturers all seem to be competing with each other in who can produce the most crappy USB implementations, so I sympathize with your hard drive problems.
One possibility that may work (depending on your situation) is a shareware app called Time Machine Scheduler. This allows you to schedule Time Machine backups at a different rate from once an hour, BUT, more importantly, it handles backups to an unmounted drive.
The way it works is
- you run the app and set up a schedule, making sure you tick the box that says "handle unmounted volume"
- you then go to the Time Machine prefs pane and SWITCH OFF the big button for Time Machine. (This is important. If you don't do this, things won't work.) What that button switches off is not really Time Machine, but the scheduler for Time Machine, which doesn't matter since we have a new scheduler.
- unmount your time machine volume.
Now, once an hour or every twelve hours, or whatever you choose, your Time Machine volume will be mounted, will backup, then will unmount. This is safer (drive is not visible on the desktop to be screwed with), is less cluttery, and saves power if your drive is one that spins down when it is unmounted. (It should, but see my point above about the sheer crapulence in this field, and brand names are no guarantee of competence.)
I performed an analysis of all my hard drives and grouped them from the best (spins down automatically when not in use, no matter what the CPU is doing) to the absolute worst (drives by fabrik CAN NOT BE SPUN DOWN because if you do so, there is a 10% chance when they power up that they will be corrupt beyond recognition) with various intermediate shades (like drives that simply do not spin down and reduce power, even when they are ejected or the CPU is put to sleep).
I then re-arranged my drive usage across all the drives bearing these facts in mind. eg the drives that can't be spun down I hooked up to my media mac (which uses low power, and which is generally in use one way or another most of the time, so I set I to never sleep, and never sleep the HDs).
The drives that never reduce power I set up as archive drives, so that most of the time they are switched off.
And the generally reasonable drives I hooked up so that the CPUs power down drives when possible, and all have their time machine volumes running unmounted now, mainly backing up every twelve hours rather than every hour.
This was something I should have down a while ago, and is definitely worth it. I used to have about five fans running to cool various crappy drives; with this new system no fans are necessary since all the worst power drives are usually switched off, or unmounted. I'm probably saving 100 to 150W 24/7 which is nothing to sneer at, and keeps the house a little cooler.
I'd recommend anyone with multiple external drives perform this sort of analysis and rebalancing.
TV, it should wake whenever you use the remote. although that could be annoying on the mini.
