Stop problematic disk spin-downs

Apr 28, '03 10:00:00AM

Contributed by: impossiblerobert

Ever since I installed Jaguar, I've been having probems with my external firewire EZQuest hard drive spinning down and locking up the finder. The problem is that it would never spin back up, and the only way I could release the finder was to power cycle the drive, which is not good at all. Note that the external FireWire drive would spindown even if I had unchecked 'Put the hard disk to sleep when possible' in the Energy Saver preference panel.

So now I have 10.2.5 and the problem still persists, so I decided to get my hands dirty and do something about it. On the EZQuest support site, they suggested trying this AppleScript from macmaps.com.

To my glee, it worked, but it required running the script after every boot and entering the root password. So I made my first startup script to mimic this function, and it appears to work just fine without having to sudo as root.

A script to prevent hard drive spindown:

  1. Create a folder in /Library/StartupItems/ and name it SpindownFix

  2. Create a text file in /Library/StartupItems/ SpindownFix/ and name it SpindownFix

  3. Add the folowing to the text file:
    #!/bin/sh
    # Prevent hard drives from spinning down unnecessarily
    . /etc/rc.common
    pmset -a spindown 0
  4. Now make it executable with:
    chmod a+x /Library/StartupItems/SpindownFix/SpindownFix
  5. Create another text file in /Library/StartupItems/SpindownFix and name it StartupParameters.plist

  6. Add the following to the text file:
    {
    Description     = "Spindown Fix";
    Provides        = ("No Spindown");
    OrderPreference = "Late";
    }
Upon your next boot, spindown should be disabled totally. To double check, in the terminal enter pmset -g; spindown should now be 0.

I would appreciate if someone would look this over and double check that I didn't do anything bad here...

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