[G4] Sleep, Different Kinds

[John Collins]

Brian and Shaene-- your info is useful. Do you know how this applies to 
external FW drives. Do they spin down as well as the internal drives? I 
have several external FW devices that I use on an occasional basis--how 
is the best way to handle them.

Brian-- I notice in a later post-- you evidently disconnect yours. I 
would find this inconvenient but I could do it if that seems to be the 
best way. I use mine primarily for archiving and backup purposes (on a 
manual basis not with software).

Any thoughts?

John in Tucson
On Feb 10, 2004, at 8:23 PM, Brian Silverio wrote:

> Anne,
> "Use separate time to put display to sleep" just turns your monitor 
> off.  If you are running a download or or backup they will continue to 
> run.  Move the mouse or press a key and the monitor turns back on.
>
> "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" will cause your hard 
> drive(s) to spin down if they are not accessed in some (unknown to me) 
> time period.  I have five drives and find that my boot drive rarely 
> spins down.  The others often do.  Then when I do something that uses 
> the "sleeping" drive I have to wait for it to spin up to speed.  Again 
> downloads and backups will continue to run w/o problem.
>
> "Put computer to sleep when it is inactive for x minutes" is another 
> story.  My understanding of "inactive" is that a human has not touched 
> a key or moved the mouse in x minutes.  when this happens your 
> downloads will stop, also any other process that is running will stop. 
>  Things will resume when you wake the machine up.  Your download will 
> have to be restarted.  I would think twice about trusting a backup 
> that had a system sleep happen in the middle.  Unless you had verified 
> the backup.
>
> I hope this helps
>
> Brian