Hard disk spin-down

I have installed a second hard drive (500GB Western Digital SATA SE16) in my Mac Pro quad-core. The drive spins down regardless of the power management settings (system preferences) and does so even when I’m actively working, but not directly accessing the second drive. It then spins up, with a corresponding time lag of 10-20 seconds and the spinning beach ball, when drive access is necessary. I know from the WD website that there is a setting for a jumper on pins 3 & 4 which will prevent spin down (much like would be required for a RAID setup). Does it make sense to enable that jumper to prevent spin down in this case? Will the system power management settings still function properly with the jumper set? Thanks for any input.

Hi Pascal,
"I'd really love to be able to work in silence.. and also save my poor hard disk !"
As you already know, constantly spinning up and down is very bad for a hard disk.
The best would be to have it sleeping all the time, but if this is not possible, better leave it spinning constantly then.
"What is the annoying Panther feature (that Jaguar or OS9 didn't have) that keeps spinning my disk ?"
I'm not sure about that, but I think it has to do with the constant rewriting of files that Mac OS X uses (causing defragmentation as a side-effect, BTW).
My guess is that this didn't happen to your newly installed system, but now happens because there is much more fragmented free space on your hard drive.
Another explanation is if the OS X behaviour mentioned has been enhanced after 10.3.6 or so?
Or this can be also the kind of buggy behaviour described here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1267183#1267183
The default spindown time if you choose "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in Energy Saver, is 10 minutes of inactivity.
You can use Cocktail or TinkerTool System to modify this 10 minutes delay, or paste this Terminal command:
sudo pmset -a spindown 2
to reduce the required inactivity to 2 minutes
(but again, this is not what you are looking for, as this is worse than leaving it constantly spinning, unless perfect silence is so important to you).
I don't know how to tell Mac OS X to behave like former systems though, and I don't even know if it is possible at all.
Usually someone would like to set a longer spindown delay, like
sudo pmset -a spindown 120
for example.
Good luck!
Axl

Similar Messages

Internal Hard Disk spin down - Mac locks up

Hi.
Recently my iMac has started to occasionally lock up. The other evening it was quiet and I heard the hard drive spin down. Following this any action results in the beach ball, and eventually everything locks up, because it cannot read from or write to the disk.
I have tried disabling hard drive sleep. Reseting the SMC and PRAM.
Not sure if it is related, but I also noticed that the system profiler reports that the last hardware test was run in 4008 (I'm sure it used to say 2008). So I ran a hardware test, no problems. The last hardware test date is now reported as 28th June 4010. Hmmmm.
Any thoughts on this, or help as to the next step will be very happily received.

It is normal to see the spinning beach ball cursor while the drive spins up, but obviously it should go away once the drive is spun up & the iMac should not eventually lock up.
Also, not every drive honors the spin-down command from the OS -- some spin down automatically according to their own internal timer regardless of the system preference -- but AFAIK no drive Apple ships in any Mac does this.
So just to cover all the possibilities, can you confirm that your iMac has the original internal drive it shipped with, & that there are no external drive(s) attached to it? If you do have any external drives, does the issue persist if they are unattached?
You might want to run Disk Utility's Verify/Repair Disk step on each drive you use to make sure a file system issue is not involved, & the Apple Hardware Test (which will require removing any non-essential peripherals like external drives & thus not test them) to see if a hardware issue is causing this.

Hard Disks Spinning Down

Apologies if this has been answered.
In the Energy Saver preferences, I have unchecked the preference to spin down the hard disks (put them to sleep). But even so, the disks still spin down, which leaves me staring at the beach ball several times a day. I have the other preferences set to sleep both the system and display after 1 hour.
Is there a way in 10.4.6 to keep the disks from spinning down?
QuickSilver Mac OS X (10.4.6)

I have the same problem with a similar, if not identical, computer.
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist)
The problem still happens. Can anyone help?

Hard drive spins down and have to do a hard reboot

I have an Intel iMac 3.06 (April 2008). Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard especially when I am using itunes (9.02) (downloading) the hard drive spins down for no reason at all.The energy settings are fine. The only option I have is to hold the power button down for 5 sec and reboot when it happens. I know this has been an issue with other intel iMacs but when the "fix" for other machines was available it said my machine did not need it. I beg to differ. This is getting very annoying as I am sure it is not doing the hard drive any good having to hard reboot all the time.
I have tried the power management reset which has not resolved the problem.

Hi David
Welcome to Apple Discussions
1. In the Energy Saver preference try setting Computer sleep: to "Never" and make sure the the box "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is unchecked.
2. Try resetting the System Management Controller as described in the article below.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543
Now then if you are still having a problem you might also:
1. Use the Restore Default button on the Energy Saver preference panel and then reselect your sleep settings.
or
2. Go to: Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > SystemConfiguration and trash the "com.apple.PowerManagement.plist" which also restore's the Energy Saver preference to default, then go back to the Energy Saver preference and reselect your sleep settings.
Dennis

Disks spin down (sleep) unbidden

Under Tiger (10.4.6) One or more of my internal hard drives spin down (sleep) when the drive isn't accessed for a short time, even if I'm using the computer, e.g. typing a message.
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist) and reset the pram. The problem still happens.
Can anyone help?

This problem is definitely related to Tiger, at least partly. Previously, I was running 10.2, and this didn't happen.
It's not the only change to my drive behavior that appeared when I installed Tiger. At some point when I was running 10.2, I mistakenly moved my third internal hard drive (which is on its own interface card) to the wrong connector on the ribbon cable. The drive still worked, but it would spin down after an hour or so if I didn't access the drive. But the other 2 drives would keep spinning. When I installed Tiger, things changed. It didn't even see that third drive at all, and the other 2 drives would spin down after some short time (like 15 minutes or so) of inactivity. I moved the drive to the correct connector on the ribbon cable, and all of a sudden, Tiger recognized the drive -- but that drive now spins down too after a short time. Again, this is a new behavior under Tiger.
FYI, I migrated from 10.2 to 10.4, so it could have been a change introduced in 10.3.
G4 dual 1GHz Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Disks spinning down unbidden

you folks in this topic are so knowledgeable, maybe you can shed some light on this one. I got no answer for it in other topics, maybe because some underlying Unix thing is related to the problem? Or not. I don't have a clue.
Under Tiger (10.4.6) One or more of my internal hard drives spin down (sleep) when the drive isn't accessed for a short time, even if I'm using the computer, e.g. typing a message or editing a file. This is a new behavior that appeared when I installed Tiger, under 10.2 and 10.1 it didn't happen (I skipped 10.3).
I have unchecked "put hard disks to sleep" in the Energy Saver and trashed the preferences (Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist) and reset the pram. The problem still happens. I don't even have a clue which piece of software is responsible for this.
Can anyone help?

Bill's got a good reply there... but if you don't understand what using sudo does, you might want to do a quick bit of reading (in very VERY short: you are 'God' on that machine)
You should check out pmset -g as well (don't need to run it with sudo ('as root')

Hard drive spin down - good or bad for the drives

Having had a few drives fail recently, I've started to wonder about the whole issue of the energy saver preference for having hard drives spin down. I've always had it disabled because it seems to be generally believed that that's the way to work on a fcp (or avid for that matter) editing system. But now that I've started imagining every drive failing, I'm wondering whether it makes sense to perhaps have another user account that I switch to for nonediting moments in which the spin down option is enabled.
Any opinions out there?

Drive manufacturors report a MTBF (mean time between failures) often in the 200,000 hours range. This works out to something like 22 years. Drives that fail in less time than that are often subjected to three things:
- heat
- voltage irregularities - spikes or brownouts
- physical shocks
oh, and did I mention heat?
As drive RPM increases, so does energy consumption and heat. The best thing you can do for drives is to keep them in a cool, well ventilated location and to put them on a conditioned power supply.
FWIW, I have scsi drives that are over 10 years old running everyday with no issues.
Spindown seems to be an energy saver issue but I wonder about the cycle of powering down and back up over and over and over. It seems like that would put much more stress on bearings, motors and the like.
good luck.
x

Ipod hard disk spins continiously when connected to PC, kills battery?

when ipod 4th generation is connected to PC/Windows Pro, connecting to itunes and downloading songs, hard disk spins continuioulsy discharging the full battery in 5 minutes. Battery is good because it will play 5 hours on full charge. Genius at Apple Genius Bar say hard disk spins continiously when it's hook to PC, he say this discharges battery, genius does not know why HD spins continously.... say it should only spin once every 20 min or so while downloading song, when hooked to mac at genius bar, downloads songs as designed

see Restore to factory setting helps
if does not try the following as the spins may caused by the bad sectors on the HD of the iPod
For Window computer
Go to folder “My Computer”
Hope you can see your iPod there and right click on the iPod
Choose “Format”. Ensure the settings are at “Default” and that “Quick Format” is not checked
Now select “Format”
Eject your iPod and do a Reset
Open the iTunes 7 and click “Restore”

External disk spin down

I have a OWC firewire 800 external hard drive. I want to know if there is a way that I can keep it from spinning down so that info can be accessed more readily. After all what's the point of having a high speed external if it has to spin up every time I want to access it?

Go to system preferences / energy saver / sleep and uncheck put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

Hard disk spins during sleep

Somehow even when the screen is black my hard disks keeps spinning which is surely likely to wear it out sooner rather than later.
Any idea what I can do?

milew66 wrote:
Thanks, unfortunately I do not have applecare, although still have time on my warranty. It ***** that no one can answer a simple question for me over the phone. I pay 1800$ for a computer that is supposed to be top of the line, 6 months later it is talking in its sleep, and they want 19$ to answer a question over the phone. I really do not want to lug my 27 inch computer an hour away if this can be resolved another way.
Are there ANY doagnostic/hardware tests/software that I can buy or whatever to run and let me know if the HDD has errors? I have windows installed as well via bootcamp. If I run a hard drive scanner on that side, will it only scan that partition?
OS X has exactly what you need built into it, OS X is a much more efficient system than MS Windows.There is a utility called Disk Utility built into the system, to repair the HD and check for it's overall health boot in the Recover Partion, to do this when you hear the startup tone hold down the OPTION Key and choose the Recovery Partion, then choose Disk Utility and you can run Repair Disk. If it has errors (which I'm almost certain yours does not) they will be reported. I would also recommend you run Repair Disk Permissions and also read:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
BTW as long as your machine is less than 1 year old you can still buy AppleCARE, if you still can then I'd strongly recommend you do so. If for no other reason it will provide you 3 years of peace of mind and you can call AppleCare support if you have anyquestions. If your machine is covered by AppleCARE and requires a part replacement 3x Apple will replace your machine. In addition if you live within 50 miles of an AASP you can request on-site service.

Attached disk spin down

Anybody figure out how to have the attached USB drives spin down when not in use? I'm guessing it will have to be a new firmware fix... Otherwise, I guess Apple will be OK with buying everybody new disks next year... works for me..

There are multiple threads discussing this issue. One of them is "Any idea whether the AE spins down USB hard drives?"

Hard Drive Spin Down....Good or Bad??

'Two questions, really, but first some background. I have an earlier Mac Pro running 10.7.3 (as I recall). I also have a Sonos music system. All the hard drive bays in the Mac Pro are occupied. The first has a 2 TB Western Digital RE that has my OS and all my files on it. Bay's 2 and 3 have two 3TB drives from Hitachi which are mirrored and serve as my internal daily backup which is run and cloned by CCC. The fourth drive is another RE that has copies of all my music. I simply copy my two iTunes folders and any other music I want the Sonos system to access to this fourth drive. My reason for doing this is that I wanted to minimize the run time of my main hard drive as not so long ago, I had two Seagate drives go belly up on me. All the music on the fourth drive (that serves the Sonos system) comes from my main hard drive which is backed up to the two mirrored internal drives as well as a G-Technolgy mirrored external drive, so I'm not concerned with backing up the drive serving the Sonos system. So......
Question one is: Which is better for drives in general, to keep them spinning all the time, or to allow or force them to spin down if they aren't being accessed?
Question two is: If it is better to spin down a drive, how can I selectively spin down some drives and not others?
For instance, I'm thinking that it is better to spin drives down, then I'd like to be able to spin down drive #1 with my OS but not the Sonos drive because the Sonos system prefers that the drive not spin down or there are connection errors.
Thanks for all your answers and suggestions!

I understand the limitions of mirrored drives, but my main drive is not mirrored. What is mirrored are my backup drives. One daily backup onto mirrored drives in bay's 3 and 4 in the Mac Pro. And a less frequent backup on mirrored drives that are stored in a fireproof safe in the garage. Should my main, non-mirrored drive fail (hopefully it'll be a long time as it's an enterprise class drive), I've then got any one of four cloned drives to choose from. Of course, I would choose the most recent ones that are internal, but should something catastrophic like a fire occur, I'd then have two identical cloned and bootable drives in the garage.
I recognize that in the case of a real catastrophy, the drives in the garage won't be as current as the drives in the Mac Pro, but in both cases, the backups themselves are pretty robust because they are mirrored. If one backup drive fails, the other will likely be fine and I can then easily proceed from there.
It set up properly, mirrored drives offer some great redundency in case of hard drive failure. What prompted me to go this route was three drive failures in one year, all of which were Seagate Barracuda drives and relatively new. And two of them were backup drives. My backup drives are now Hitachi and mirrored in case one dies. And CCC makes it so I can just plug the backup drive into my #1 bay and I'm back up in business. Except for MS Office which somehow limits the number of times it can be cloned and you have to call MS and get a new product code. Easy to do, but a pain. I learned this as a result of swapping cloned drives in and out of my wife's MacBook. It all worked perfectly until I did it once too many times and MS wouldn't load. Hence the call to MS.
Thanks for all your feedback!
Oh, and any info on controling which drives spin down and which don't?

Firefox 4.0 causing near constant hard disk spin?

Every since I've installed Firefox 4.0, my hard disk starts spinning the moment I do any active browsing or typing in the browser. It seems as though everything I do in 4.0 is being cached to my hard disk.
This never happened with 3.6. Also, it doesn't happen when I use Internet Explorer.
Perhaps there's a cache or memory setting I can change to fix this problem? I do have Memory Fox installed. Perhaps there is a conflict?

I just reinstalled 3.61 and my hard drive stopped the constant spinning. :)
You can downgrade back to Firefox 3.6 by going [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html here] . I didn't need to do anything else including uninstalling 4.0 or any associated upgrades.

Time capsule hard disk spinning out of control

My TC's hard disk out of of the blue yesterday started spinning louder than it usually does and cuasing it to emit a whirring, grinding like sound which acclerated to the point I thought the tc was either going to become airborn and/or explode or both.
The tc was not living in unusal condions both enviroment, configuration or extreme temperature variations. It was on a seperate return portion of my desk with nothing around it to crowd or adversly affect. Configuration is ethernet to comcast smc business gateway over the wan port and a direct ethernet to thunderbolt conx to my macbook pro retina and finally a sonos bridge was connected as well.
At the time this occured I had not been putting the tc through anything more unusal than providing DHCPservices for my local area network in my house.
When I plug it back in its spits and tries to spin but gives up and the status light remains solid amber. it will not reset either as far as changing from solid amber to blinking to open airport utility.
its a first generation 500gb tc, however it is the third device genius bar has replaced since i purchased originally in Apr 2009? each time genius bar has replaced it through apple care on my mac as a peripheral device covered by applecare they have strangly had three! of the original (same 2008/9 model to replace the failed one which none to date has ever had any of the sympotons i describe here. just trouble accessing files. Now my fear is I no longer have the imac w/apple care the tc was covered by but I have a new macbook pro retina which I bought in December and is still under warranty so i wanted to try and economize and wait to by apple care later this spring.
all my backups are on the tc 500 gigs worth plus I need the router support as i have comcast business class and they dont offer a wifi cable modem. I'm frantic that I will get nothing from apple care or genius bar but the same bland, robotic like detatchment all apple employees seem to be secretly instructed to treat its custromers with these days as they maddeningly tell me to buy a newer tc for $299 or $399 that i simply dont have the money to do so and dont antcipate having it at all in the next 6 months especially snce I just shelled out 2 grand in Decemeber for the new macbook pro retina. Especially saddened I coud have potentially lost all of my photos and my 60 or so gigs of itunes media purchased entirely from itunes fair and square for the past decade to the tune of twenty thousand dollars!
Appreciative of all your expertise,
Desperately mistrustful of Apple in the post Steve culture
San Francisco, Calif

I am reading through the boards here and it sounds as though there was a small fraction of those who purchased the orignal tc in the spring of 2008 who have experinced the same issues exactly. It also sounds as though Apple ackowledged this to those who complained with a replacement of a later generation tc AND conceeded to those affected that there was indeed a design flaw. Astonishingly, Apple did not issue a press release nor a product recall!
As I said Genius Bar here in San Francisco did replace the device three times but with the exact same model. The most recent swap was in Jan of 2012.
I am sick to death of being disregarded and abused by Apple everytime I experience a valid hardware issue or reuire tech support period. Since 2004 I have faithfully purchased Apple Care agreements with nearly every device I've purchased and this one time when I try to save a little money by waiting untill the 90 day warranty on my macbook pro I purchased in Dec 2012 is close to expiring AS advised "off the record" by more than one Apple Care advisor.
An abbriviated list of the hardware I have purchaded directly from Apple retail and online:
2 ipod classics 2004
3 ipod nanos 2006, 2007, 2009
macbook white unibody 2007
macbook black special edition 2008
macbook aluminum 2009
imac 20" 2008
imac 24" 2009
imac 27" 2010
time capsule 2008
airport expresss 4 purchased between 2008-2012
the last airport express I bought less than one week before the new model hit the shelves but do you think Apple felt compelled to tell me or even let me trade up?
iphone frst gen 2007
iphone 3g 2008
iphone 3gs (4 devices of this model purchased between 2008-2010
iphone 4 (2 devices)
iphone 4s "
iphone 5 purchased in oct 2012
Macbook pro retina purchased Dec 2012
Do you think maybe I've just been a little too loyal? Or am I just stupid???

External hard drive spinning down (and up) on it's own

I thought my 5 month old external 1tb dual drive was dying at first, but now am seeing a pattern. There is a forum over at macrumors about this. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=445690
I always make sure in my energy settings i have spin down external drives unchecked, because it's known that spin downs and ups can cause drives to fail sooner. Yet I now find my external drive spinning down whenever it's not in use while I'm sitting at my computer, and i hear it spin up at the most random times, even when i'm not using my computer. sometimes in the middle of the night. This did not happen in tiger.
It's connected by firewire 800. At first I thought it was time machine but others in the macrumors forum claim it isn't that. I almost think its network activity. I'm considering using an applescript to access the drive every 5 or ten minutes automatically yet not do anything just to see if this stops it from spinning it down. I do consider this an annoyance and would hope apple will figure out what it is very soon, before it causes any detriment to the life of my expensive drive.

did you ever find a fix for this?
my ext FW800 drives constantly spin down, then when i do something later i get the beachball until they spin back up

Hard disk spin-down

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