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Use a cron job to prevent hard drive spindown
Authored by: alaskinhuski on Jul 18, '08 03:30:21PM

I love the idea, but when I tried it, I found that after the first ls -la of my drive, the hard drive spins up, but for subsequent times it doesn't bother and just prints the same list. It must know that nothing has changed so there's no need to access the drive again, or something.

What's crazy is that my hard drive, a Maxtor OneTouch 4, spins down after as little as ONE MINUTE of inactivity.

So now I'm using a touch cron job like someone suggested,

*/1 * * * * touch -m /Volumes/"External HD"/Relentless

, but now I feel like this really really can't be good for the drive. Every minute I'm writing to the drive.

Does anyone know a Mac OS X command that would simply cue the drive to keep spinning?

Or is there some way to force it to look for a new file list?

Also, I've tried using cat to the /dev/null also, but again, after the first use, my drive doesn't bother spinning up and it just spews out the same cat as before unless I made some change on the drive between 'cat's



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