Firewire drives sleeping too much.... help?

Question

Hi all,
I have seven external Firewire drives, both Lacie D2 and G-Raid. Seems like ever since I got the G5 these drives go to sleep in about 10 minutes if I don't access them. Then when I have to do a search, or use the finder, I have to wait for a full minute while the drives individually spin up (one after the other after the other... etc.).
The System preferences settings make no difference. This is a big problem for me. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Matt

Answer 1

Well, Matt,
Energy Saver default behaviour is to spin down all internals and externals that are left unaccessed, at the same time after 10 minutes of inactivity, if you chose the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option.
And to let them all awake if it is unchecked.
—> One thing you can set yourself manually without Developer Tools:
The spindown time for all internals and externals.
Set it to 120 minutes instead of 10, using this Terminal command:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 120
so that they stay awake long enough but sleep at night still.
If you want them to never spindown, type this command:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
If this works, it means a preference file is corrupted somewhere. The one that "tells" Energy Saver settings to PowerManagement.
I don't know which one is it, but hopefully Preferential Treatment would find it?
(Here, a Terminal command that verifies even more prefs than PT:
sudo find /Library/Preferences -name *.plist -exec plutil {} \;;find ~/Library/Preferences -name *plist -exec plutil {} \;
Let us know!
Curious too,
Axl