Maggie McFee – Whinging on the Internet since 1994

It’s the simple things…

// February 4th, 2011 // Rambling, tech

I have a scratch volume consisting of several drives in a software RAID setup on my Mac Pro at work. One of the more annoying things is that when I set it about ingesting something, toddle off to do other work while it does so and then come back more or less when it’s done, inevitably the drives will have spun down and I’ll have to wait for them to spin back up. It’s not a long wait, but it’s annoying one. Especially as I can’t, say, eject the camera that’s connected while they’re spinning up.

Boring. GimmeGimmeGimme. NowNowNow.

I don’t want to disable drive sleep because the machine does sit idle sometimes. So what’s a girl to do? Google the pmset options and figure out how to fix this annoyance, that’s what. Turns out, it’s totally configurable (when you have “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” enabled):

sudo pmset -a disksleep 40

You can take a look at what your basic settings currently are with:
sudo pmset -g

Now my disks won’t spin down for 40 minutes. So if I wander off to lunch, they will spin down. If I’m just taking a bit too long to get back to an ingest/capture/encode, I don’t have to wait for each drive to spin up and the volume (and machine) to become ready. This works for any drives that are directly controlled by the machine (be it a Mac Pro or a laptop). It’s not relevant to any RAID which is hung off a controller card or enclosure with an in-built controller.

Just thought I’d share. Especially since I haven’t posted anything here in ages…
M