Stopping the harddrive spinning down

Question

On my powermac it was not such an issue but on my intel iMac is you leave the computer even for just 1 minute the harddrive spins down so when you goto open a mail or whatever you have to wait with the spinning ball for the drive to spin back up.
I have the 'put drive to sleep' unticked so its something else.
Is there anyway to stop this annoying thing, I wouldn't mind after 10 minutes or what ever but 1 minute is just silly.

Answer 1

739/3185
Hello again Gary,
"The downside is the mac won't go to sleep now lol."
Here is the kind of command you could try:
sudo pmset -a displaysleep 10 disksleep 20 sleep 30
(but check the man pmset "arguments" names, in case they are different in Intel Tiger).
Another way, since you have the Developer Tools installed, is to edit the preference file with Property List Editor.
You should definitely try to remove this .plist, and when you're at it, this one too
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist
just in case.
Logout/login, every Energy Saver settings should be reset to default, see if it works.
Also:
Testing corrupted preferences:
Try this Terminal command
sudo find /Library/Preferences -name *plist -exec plutil {} \;;find ~/Library/Preferences -name *plist -exec plutil {} \;
it should work on your system.
Results:
Delete any pref file that has no "OK" in front of it.
Unless there is a new kind of sleep bug with the new Macs,
it should work as intended in Energy Saver.
Try restarting too, instead of just logging out, as these settings belong to the whole system after all.
Cheers!
(Lars, yes, a nice little piece of software. I like OnyX and TinkerTool System too...)
Axl