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Stop problematic disk spin-downs
Authored by: jimhoyt on May 01, '03 11:53:34PM

I've got 2 external firewire drives that I need to keep spinning. I'm pretty sure this has been covered before but a cron entry of

*/5 * * * * ls /Volumes/volumename > /dev/null

will list the top directory to the bit bucket every 5 minutes.

Works for me...



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Stop problematic disk spin-downs
Authored by: tootired on Oct 19, '04 02:03:06PM

Hi !

What about that (only for UNIX folks):

The following crontab entry reads the very first byte from the external harddisk every 10 minutes (direct from the drive, not from the cache, no writes to disk, just real disk reads):

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/hexdump -n 1 </dev/rdisk1 >/dev/null 2>&1

dont mix "<" and ">" or you are lost !!
always make backups !!
read the man pages !!

Instead of "/dev/rdisk1" use the UNIX raw character device name used for your external hard disk. You can find out that with:

$ mount|grep your_volume_name
/dev/disk1s10 on /Volumes/your_volume_name (local, journaled)


Instead of the (buffered) block device "/dev/disk1s10" you take the raw character device "/dev/rdisk1" (note the "r" before the name and omit slice "s10" from it).

(No warranties; seems to work for me - at least doing no harm: use at your own risk!!)

Hans



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