Possible to spin down HDD's separately.

[seveej]

My Mac Pro has 4 disks.
1 SSD houses OS and Apps.
2 HDD's (Raid, mirrored) house all the pertinent data.
1 HDD is reserved for future bootcamp use.

Question: is there a way to spin that bootcamp disk down more aggressively? I mean I do not use it every day and would feel happy if it would rotate only when necessary... (Energy saver just offers one checkbox for all)

RGDS,

 

[Tesselator]

Older versions of the CHUD apps have an "HD Spindown" tool if you wanna script it or do it manually...

http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Apple-CHUD-Tools-Download-1502.html

IIRC, it installs on the root or your boot drive in a folder called Developer.

 

[bernuli]

I use disk utility to unmount external drives so they spin down. I imagine you can do the same with internal drives.

 

[Tesselator]

Yeah, the Eject command works on all drives but the boot drive...

 

[tomvos]

Question: is there a way to spin that bootcamp disk down more aggressively?

There’s the terminal command pmset which allows you to review and set power management values in more detail than the energy saver control panel.

Open a terminal and type

pmset -g

to review the current settings. To change settings, first read the man page.

man pmset

Then, you might want to try something like

sudo pmset -a disksleep 5

to change the spin down timer from the default value of 10 minutes down to 5 minutes. Keep in mind that lower values are going to spin down your driver earlier, but will ultimately increase the number of spin down—spin up cycles of your drive. Too many of these cycles will kill your hard drive eventually.

 

[seveej]

I use disk utility to unmount external drives so they spin down. I imagine you can do the same with internal drives.

I tried this. On SL, disk utility's unmount button is greyed out for internal drives.

I know I should know this, but I've been so happy with parallels, that I haven't used bootcamp since 2008 (and that was on a MBP running Leopard):
Does Bootcamp work with external drives - I could just use an external FW drive if it could handle that, because my need is really very rare And I would be happy to not have an extra HDD spinning (and making noise and consuming power)...

RGDS,

 

[bernuli]

I tried this. On SL, disk utility's unmount button is greyed out for internal drives.

Thats interesting. I am using Snow Leopard on a laptop with 1 internal drive. I have the one internal drive partitioned for Bootcamp. With Disk Utility, I can unmount the Bootcamp partition. It is of course grayed out when I select the OS X partition.

B

 

[seveej]

Thats interesting. I am using Snow Leopard on a laptop with 1 internal drive. I have the one internal drive partitioned for Bootcamp. With Disk Utility, I can unmount the Bootcamp partition. It is of course grayed out when I select the OS X partition.

B

Hmm...

Have to have a look at that again. May be the problem is that the HDD currently has two partitions: One unused partition and another, which contains an (inactive) SuperDuper clone of my working OS.

Thanks.