Prev: What's that clicking noise?
Next: testing
From: E Z Peaces on 1 Dec 2009 15:23
nospam wrote:
> In article <hf1n2v$q6u$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>, E Z Peaces
> <cash(a)invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>>>> I wish I could keep the disk awake. Spinning takes very little power,
>>>> and spinning up probably means wear and tear as well as a delay.
>>> it's actually less wear unless it's spinning down and up every few
>>> minutes.
>> How did you find out? Manufacturers state reliability in hours of
>> typical use and numbers of spin-up cycles, but not in hours of spinning.
>> Don't bearings run on a film of air? Each spin-up means a
>> temperature change.
>
> a non-spinning disk has *no* wear.
>
> there's a balance between repeated spin-down/spin-up every few minutes
> and having it spin down when not in use and spin up some number of
> hours later. the latter will extend the life of drive, especially if
> it's spun down for a while, like overnight.

In 1997, manufacturers began using fluid bearings. Kept rotating, the
life of a fluid bearing is theoretically infinite, but it depends on
pressure that's generated by rotation. That means the wear and tear of
spin-ups is of concern to manufacturers. Fluid bearings are highly
resistant to shock when not turning. That could be a reason disks are
designed to spin down unless told otherwise.

The OEM internal drive in my PPC Mini was slow, so I began booting from
a 3.5" drive in a Firewire enclosure. That enclosure kept the drive
spinning. When the enclosure failed, its replacement allowed the disk
to spin down... I think the time was less than 15 minutes.

The spin-up was under 5 seconds but sometimes my computer wouldn't
respond for 36 seconds. Apparently this happened when the OS tried to
look up an IP before the disk had spun up. I don't recall such a delay
resulting from spin-up if I booted from my internal drive.

From: aRKay on 1 Dec 2009 17:23
In article <doug-02D35E.20073629112009(a)news-40.giganews.com>,
Doug Jantzer <doug(a)gmail.com.invalid> wrote:

> Does anyone have a suggestion on fixing it.

Use your OS X Disk Utility to erase the the whole Seagate mess
and format it as a Mac drive with the GUID Partition Table.

Let the Mac control the sleep.
From: Paul Sture on 2 Dec 2009 12:42
In article <hf18nq$3ku$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>,
E Z Peaces <cash(a)invalid.invalid> wrote:

> I encountered it when I moved a disk from one Firewire box to another,
> so the sleep instruction must originate in the box. As I recall, when
> it delayed my Mac, the delay could be 5 to 36 seconds. The disk had a
> maximum spinup time of 5 seconds, so something else was involved.
>
> I wish I could keep the disk awake. Spinning takes very little power,
> and spinning up probably means wear and tear as well as a delay.

One thing which works with my Western Digital drive which has the same
annoying behaviour is to start up a Terminal session and do a

cd /Volumes/offending-drive

and leave it running.

--
Paul Sture
From: Paul Sture on 2 Dec 2009 12:56
In article <hf198q$885$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>,
E Z Peaces <cash(a)invalid.invalid> wrote:

> I wonder if a utility could be written to keep an external disk awake by
> having the Mac ask it something every few minutes.

I did find Disksomnia, but it's of little use unless you have Final Cut
Pro or Final Cut Express.

http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/disksomnia

"Up All Night
Disksomnia solves this problem by giving external disks a gentle poke
every 55 seconds if Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express is running."


If they'd only tell us how they did it...

--
Paul Sture
From: thepixelfreak on 2 Dec 2009 13:20
On 2009-12-01 14:23:09 -0800, aRKay <arkay(a)nospam.qsl.net> said:

> In article <doug-02D35E.20073629112009(a)news-40.giganews.com>,
> Doug Jantzer <doug(a)gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have a suggestion on fixing it.
>
> Use your OS X Disk Utility to erase the the whole Seagate mess
> and format it as a Mac drive with the GUID Partition Table.
>
> Let the Mac control the sleep.

How a drive is formatted has nothing to do with the drives controller
firmware setting that tells it to go to sleep after a period of no
read/write/seek activity.

--

thepixelfreak

First  |  Prev  |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Prev: What's that clicking noise?
Next: testing