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10.3: Use Secure Empty Trash to reclaim hard disk space
I personally wouldn't rely too heavily on this trick. The extra disc activity involved probably shortens the lifespan of the disc (and all hard drives will fail sooner or later, it's just things like this that help determine whether it'll be later or a lot sooner). The primary thing that "ages" hard drives is spinning them down and up, so having a "hard disk sleep time" will wear your drive a lot faster then this. Most of the stuff that gets used when reading/writing the disk is either always going anyway (drive spinning), or all eletronic (read write heads). The only thing you are putting "undue stress" on is the seek motor, and you are not giving it that much of a workout. This isn't like reving your car up to the red line "because it sounds cool". The wear on the drive is very minor, and probbably less then a lot of other things people do (at least on laptops).
10.3: Use Secure Empty Trash to reclaim hard disk space
If you could KEEP a hard drive spun down for a significant amount of time (a half-hour or longer, to allow it to cool down) when it's not being accessed, that might increase the life of the drive, but if you have only one drive in your Mac, that drive is constantly being accessed while you're using the Mac, so a spindown setting would be pretty useless in that situation since the drive would constantly be spun down and up again, and this might add to the wear and tear caused by a hard drive's main enemy, heat. The Energy Saver prefpane's setting "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" doesn't let you set how much user inactivity time after which the drive is supposed to spin down, so who knows what figure it uses? If it spins down after only a few minutes of user inactivity, many Macs will spin their drives down and up over and over, as the user pauses or steps away from their Mac for a few minutes throughout the day. I think some third-party utilities let you set the delay before a drive spins down; but if the drive isn't able to stay spun down for more than a half-hour or so at a time, a spindown setting would probably be useless or worse since it wouldn't have time to cool down substantially. |
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