[G4] Sleep: Good or Bad?

[Daniel Brieck]

Thats a very good thing to think about. Spinning up frequently, i guess  
that once it is spinning it takes less  force/ power to keep it  
spinning. I wonder how significant the reduction of the life of the  
Drive is by spinning up and down every  few minutes. This frequent spin  
up, spin down  is  promoted in mac os 10.2 and 10.3's Energy Saver  
System preference, hence the name "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when  
possible." I had this enabled for a short time back when 10.2 came out,  
but because it caused such a performance slow down I quickly disabled  
it. There use to be  a slider right in the Energy Saver preference  
(Since 7.5 http://oit.uta.edu/desktop/energystar/mac7_5.html)  to set  
more appropriate times for hard drive spin down that were longer than   
"when possible." Which is kind of vague, but i think it means this, if  
the drive is not active for a small amount of time (a few minutes) it  
spins down... What is the logic behind that? Utilities such as  
"cocktail" allow some adjustment of the spin down time but it is  
limited to 0 -> 10 minutes.

On Feb 6, 2004, at 1:16 PM, Perry The Cynic wrote:

> --On Thursday, February 5, 2004 9:40 PM -0500 Kevin Willis  
> <res19rmg at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
> One note on hard drives: by far the most stressful thing for a hard  
> drive is spin-up. Frequently spinning a drive down and back up does  
> *not* make it live longer; if anything, it stresses it out more. Of  
> course, assuming you have the energy saver panel set to turn the drive  
> off on inactivity, sleeping won't make a difference here. Spinning a  
> drive down does save some energy and a bit of noise.
>
>
>
> Cheers
>  -- perry
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ----
> Perry The Cynic                                              
> perry at cynic.org
> To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed  
> Cynic.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ----
Dan Brieck Jr.