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Simpler crontab for drive spindown prevention
Authored by: ckgaparajita on May 11, '02 11:56:24AM
The original hint had us creating a shell file which was then run by cron. This isn't necessary, since you can just execute the shell file command directly in the crontab. The easiest way to edit crontabs is with the excellent freeware utility Cronnix. It can be downloaded from VersionTracker. Once in Cronnix, do the following: 1. Click New to create a new crontab task. 2. Enter "*" (without the quotes) in the Min, Hour, Mday, Month, and Wday columns. This runs the task every minute. 3. If the drive you want to fix is the boot volume, enter:
     ls / > /dev/null
in the Command column. If the drive you want to fix is not the boot volume, enter:
     ls /Volumes/MyVolume > /dev/null
in the Command column, replacing "MyVolume" with the name of any volume on the target drive. 4. Click Save and then quit Cronnix. That is all you need to do to stop drive spindown. Works like a charm!

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Doesn't seem to work for me...
Authored by: Ryan0751 on Oct 12, '02 12:05:17PM
I tried to set this up with 10.2, and it doesn't seem to prevent my Maxtor from sleeping (hard disk spindown is turned off in the system control panel of course). I tried both the cron job doing an "ls" as well as the "touch" method. I verified that the cron job is actually touching the file (if I delete it it does reappear). Any suggestions? This is VERY annoying and slows down my system considerably.

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