Home / server / Questions / 8955
Accepted
username
Asked: 2009-05-17 10:08:01 +0800 CST

How to set finer-grain HDD Sleep settings in Mac OS 10.5?

  • 772

Is it possible to specify how many minutes of inactivity Mac OS should wait before it sleeps hard disks? Is there a plist I can manually specify "60 minutes" or something?

The GUI gives you the option to "Put the Hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver preference pane, but I'd like to have it wait longer.

mac-osx mac electrical-power osx-leopard mcx

3 Answers

  1. CHUD tools contains SpindownHD which does what you want - look in:

    /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools
    • 5
  2. Best Answer

    To do it from the command line (and doesn't require the Developer Tools installed - available on any 10.4 or 10.5 system) you're looking for a utility called pmset (power management set).

    disksleep - disk spindown timer; replaces 'spindown' argument in 10.4 (value in minutes, or 0 to disable)

    eg. sudo pmset -a disksleep 60

    As always for more check out the man page

    • 4

  3. You could try SleepWatcher, an open source utility written by Bernhard Baehr, mentioned in this article:

    SleepWatcher - A utility to run tasks on sleep/wake

    • 1