Why External Hard Drives turn off Automatically?

Im using a Mac Pro and I having that problem and I want to know why.
Any hints I'll appreciate...
Robert

By off do you mean "sleep"? (drive spinning down after a while) or do you mean - off as in completely off? (power down)
If its the second - then you'll have to take a look at the drive as there might be something wrong with it.
If its sleeping - spinning down, then it depends on the controller and interface. Most enclosures allows spinning down the drives after a certain amount of time. When the drive is connected by USB etc then the controller has the responsibility and there is nothing you can do about it... If its connected via eSATA and your controller allows you to control the spinning (not all do) then you can go to your system preferences and select your energy settings... there you should have a box that allows you to put your drives to sleep when possible. But it will do all of them - not just the external ones.
Some controllers (again SATA of some sort) allows you to individually set external drives to sleep. The RocketRAID does that...
But again - if the external drive is USB etc... then nothing you can do to prevent the spinning down unless you write or read from the drive every 10 minutes or so...

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