Firewire drive

lish · 05-01-2007, 11:16 PM

Anybody know of a way to automatically shut down a firewire drive connected to a mini?

When the mini goes to sleep the firewire drive stays powered... I'm worried about the current draw and the wear on the drive.

Thanks

exhumis · 05-02-2007, 01:08 AM

Lish,
Not sure that you can. I had an older firewire Ipod back in the day, and it was always on, even when I had my computer turned off. But, I don't think it would draw much current as there is(or should not be) any activity. Are you worried about those times you will be away from your vehicle for extended periods? Put a dead man switch inline.

lish · 05-02-2007, 09:18 AM

exhumis

the drive actually has a power switch on it, but it's usually burried in my center console and i always forget to power it down.

guess i'm not too worried about it, just thought there may be a setting somewhere in osx that i could change to have it power down when the mini goes to sleep.

lish

exhumis · 05-02-2007, 05:15 PM

Ah,
I see, I misunderstood. I thought you had a portable that was powered off the usb/firewire port. External switch is nice.

iamgnat · 05-02-2007, 06:39 PM

Depending on what the drive is used for (e.g. if it has data that a running app needs, though that could be managed too) if you have programming experience, it would be easy enough to write a simple App to listen for sleep and wake NSNotification messages and then unmount/mount the drive accordingly. If I recall correctly with my portable drive, if I unmount it it will spin down, but I can remount it without replugging it in (Disk Utility and other tools will allow you to (un)mount disks).

-dave

BarryWoods · 05-03-2007, 08:31 PM

Command line.

Code:

disktool -l      <---  Shows all the drives the os knows about.
disktool -e disk#  <---  Ejects whatever drive you want, wouldn't try disk0!
disktool -m disk#  <--- Mounts whatever drive you want.

Now if you have shell access to a mac, drutil is a fun little program to play with. Especially a tower or eMac.

Code:

drutil tray open ; say "This tastes funny."

kandyman676 · 05-05-2007, 01:06 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by BarryWoods

Code:

drutil tray open ; say "This tastes funny."

Now I have to try that at work through Apple Remote Desktop and have all 75+ Macs do it a the same time :-)