How to keep hard drives awake?

And no, unchecking "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in system preferences does NOT work...
I have my original and 3 additional hard drives in my G4. 2 are set up as a RAID system and contain most of my work (clients) files. If I work on personal stuff for maybe 15 minutes or so, and don't access my drives containing client files, they fall asleep, even if I'm banging away on the keyboard doing other stuff...
Then, if I go to access something from one of those drives, there's a 10 - 15 second lag while I wait for them to wake up. Or if I'm busy working on client stuff for a while, and a iCal reminder pops up, and I want to click on it (either to view the event now, or "remind me later") or whatever, I have to wait again for 5 - 10 seconds while THAT drive wakes up...
Drives me crazy... How can I keep these things awake until I"m actually away from the keyboard and not doing anything on the computer???

If you run the 10.4 version of Apple System Profiler \[Apple Menu > About this Mac > More info] and look at the "Power" tab, you will see the second number is your Hard Disk Sleep time in minutes. They must think we all have laptops --the default is like 10 minutes. Knowing that this setting is independent, but not accessible in Energy Saver, made me crazy for just the reasons you listed.
There are two ways to change it. There are command line Utilities that can change it, and you can change it directly using Property List Editor. There does appear to be a downloadable package that includes PList Editor.
The command line Utility that changes it is pmset. It is documented in the man pages here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1. html
Check to see whether it is included in your System before you get too far -- I have it, but I have the Server Admin tools loaded.
Message was edited by: Grant Bennet-Alder

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