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Set disk spindown time via the Terminal System
Finally in 10.2 (Jaguar), the hard disk spindown mechanism works correctly. However, the problem is that, for some reason Apple decided to remove the timout bar to set how long the hard drive should be idle before it spins down. The default timeout is 10 minutes, which is too soon, in my opinion.

Fortunately, you can still control this timeout via the command line, using pmset. With this utility, you can control all the items that you would normally be able to control through the "Energy Saver" panel.

The one that interests us is the "spindown" argument to pmset. For example, if I would like to change the HD spindown timeout to 30 minutes, I would type:
 % pmset -a spindown 30
See the manual page for pmset for more information by typing man 1 pmset.
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Set disk spindown time via the Terminal | 4 comments | Create New Account
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SpinDown
Authored by: repro on Sep 18, '02 11:24:55AM

Does this also pertain to external FireWire Harddisks??



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SpinDown
Authored by: donking! on Sep 19, '02 04:14:41AM

does this apply to internal hard drives other than the system drive? is there a way to specify spindown times separately for each internal hard drive?



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SpinDown
Authored by: rorya on Nov 04, '03 01:20:09PM

No, it applies to all hard disks in the system.

---
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke



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Borke my sleep
Authored by: tophfisher on Sep 19, '02 05:12:47PM

When is set this, now my system wake up every 30 mintues.. Sucks...



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