[DM-MUG] External Firewire Drive

[Darcy Baston]

My external FW drives put themselves to sleep as long as their not in use for whatever interval of time they're internally set to sleep after. I have a LaCIE and a Western Digital. The WD sometimes does a weird whiny activity, and it's probably because I have Techtool pro set to check the SMART status of the drives every hour.

 I have a backup process that runs every 24 hours, so I leave the computer on most of time. But, I'm thinking of setting the backup to run at 10am so that when I get up in the morning, I can turn the computer on and do my general e-mail stuff, head off to work, and then the computer is only on during the day.


On Thursday, February 22, 2007, at 02:51PM, <j.corbett at mchsi.com> wrote:
>Good Afternoon,
>
>      I just got done replacing my external fire wire drive. It is attached to a older iMac G-4 through a fire wire 400 port. I just need some input on what others are doing with their external drives. I do put my Mac to sleep every night which I believe puts the external drive to sleep as well. I do not turn it off so it is on all the time, also have the OS put the hard drives to sleep when they are not in use when the machine is on.  Is this a good thing to do or will it cause undo wear on the drives?
>
>      What is the best procedure for the hard drives in general to allow them to be use for years to come. Thanks for taking the time to answer this question.
>
>James Corbett