External HD for FCPX - better to turn off or on ?

Question

Hi there,
I use my iMac mostly for fCPX, maybe 5 hours/ day and connects it with this external HD called Drobo 5D.
I on and off my iMac everytime . The problem is this Drobo5D takes a long time to boot up. So you think I should just leave the Drobo5D ON all the time ? Or off and on as per the iMac ?
Any ideas ?
Thanks

Answer 1

A couple of things. The ScreenSaver settings are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost. You'll have to determine which one of those is the one containing the idleTime parameter. On my machine, using the Terminal app command:
defaults read /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 yields:
idleTime = 900;
lastPictureDirectoryChosen = "/Users/baltwo/Library/Screen Savers";
moduleName = Cosmos;
modulePath = "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Cosmos.slideSaver";
Change it with this command:
defaults write /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 idleTime 1800, for example, changing it from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.
Setting it up for your situation is left as an exercise since I don't know how long your backups take or when you schedule them. The Applescript command would be something like:
do shell script "defaults write /Users/baltwo/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.003065aba550 idleTime 1800"
G4 450 MP Gigabit   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  
G4 450 MP Gigabit   Mac OS X (10.4.3)