There has been reported problems with second hard drives (e.g. Maxtor) that repeatedly spin down and then freeze the system for >5 - 6 seconds before they come back to life. This is very annoying. However, it is easy to work around this by creating a "cron job". This will keep your drive up and alive (i.e.no sleep).
If you'd like to learn how to use 'cron' to keep your second drive occupied and awake, read the rest of this article.
You must follow the easy steps below in the Terminal as ordinary user (not as root):
#!/bin/shThe last line should be an enter. Change its rights to executable with
cd /
ls -la > /dev/null
chmod ugo+x ActivateThis shell script does basically nothing important except run quickly.
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55<tab>*<tab>*<tab>*<tab>*<tab>(This all should be on one line; it's shown here on two for the sake of narrowness! Of course you should use the tab-key and the enter-key on the indicated <tab> and <enter> places. Please replace "Work" and "Documents" with the names of the directories where you've put the "Activate" file! N.B. there is a space between "sh" and "/Volumes....!!") This "spin" file should be readable for all (chmod ugo+r). It is the material to be read by the crontab and it means basically: run every five minutes the shell script "Activate"
[space]sh /Volumes/Work/Documents/Activate<enter>
alias cronoff crontab -r
alias spinoff crontab ~/Documents/spin
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