Sleeping one of 2 internal MBP drives

Is this possible via the "Energy Saver" control panel (Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible) or a 3rd party app?

I always turn this preference off as it gets in the way and annoys me, but I'm thinking of replacing the Superdrive in my MBP with another HDD for media and Events so I can edit away without taking an external RAID with me.

If any of you have a laptop with 2 drives in it, could you test and let me know if it sleeps the non-system drive with the preference turned on. I'd be much obliged.

Having an extra drive in there would make my life simpler, but I would only use it when editing in FCP X, so to have it spin constantly would be a waste of battery life as I only edit maybe 5% of the time I'm on the computer. Also, I use this MBP for Logic 9 and when I record with my sensitive condenser mic, it picks up EVERYTHING, so I'd rather not have a drive I'm not using for audio be spinning and adding extra noise.

Thanks,
Dave

I know of utilities that keep drives awake, but not that put them purposefully to sleep. There are a couple of utilities out there that should handle this for you. May need to do a search. It's an interesting situation.

May want to consider a Reflexion Filter, they make a smaller one that's great for on the road. Can't live without mine, as I record VO work in all sorts of places.

BenB wrote: May want to consider a Reflexion Filter, they make a smaller one that's great for on the road. Can't live without mine, as I record VO work in all sorts of places.

I take it that would be noise filter plugin? I can filter out the noise, I'd just rather avoid it if possible.
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I did find these two pages in the last couple of hours that may do the trick:

blog.macsales.com/13349-quick-tip-save-b...wn-hard-drive-sooner
"What I have been doing since I don’t often need the space of the 7200RPM drive in my optical bay is that in finder I just select the drive and right click and eject. And then if I need it for a bit I go to disk utility and mount it. I do have a question though. Should ejecting from the finder causes the optical bay drive not to spin up ever until you remount it? I ask because sometimes I feel like I hear it spin up sometimes, but perhaps I’m hearing things. "
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superuser.com/questions/251969/disable-o...ard-drive-in-macbook

I agree with sarfata. A SATA port is a SATA port. It does not make any difference to the OS that it was originally used for DVD.

I have also moved my HDD to the optical bay ($15 bracket via Amazon.com), and installed an SSD in the primary bay of my MacBook Pro Uni-15.

I get a 30% power reduction by setting the HDD to sleep, but it takes three steps:

Enable disk sleep in Energy preferences.

In Terminal:

sudo pmset -a disksleep 1
(To sleep the disk after only 1 minute.)

Also, to tep it from randomly spinning up, I disabled Spotlight on this drive

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/TSA-Data
Or the conventional way: drag the drive (all partitions) from the Finder sidebar to the list of places that Spotlight excludes, in the Spotlight Preferences
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There may be some hope in there.

Thanks,
Dave

I just ran a couple of tests.

I took a 2-drive enclosure (JBOD) and plugged it in with the Energy Saver set to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible". According to the above links, the default sleep time should be 10 minutes. This OWC enclosure has a built-in fan and I could not get it either drive to sleep even when I ejected them.

I unplugged that enclosure and then plugged in my Voyager single drive (no fan) and ran Carbon Copy Cloner for backup. I moved on to something else and forgot about it, but noticed that about 10 minutes later the drive did go to sleep. I double-clicked on the drive icon to open and display the contents and the drive woke up. I then ejected the drive (without unplugging it) and the drive spun down.

I'm not sure yet what I've learned from this exercise, but I'm more hopeful that if I put a 2nd drive in the MBP, there's something I can do to sleep it. Hopefully, just ejecting it.

Dave

I'm still trying to find a good solution without investing too much money for occasion editing away from home without having to have a power outlet available, that is, editing on battery.
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Option 1:
I can go with removing the SuperDrive and replacing it with a 2nd HDD. As I mentioned earlier, this is less useful to me if it is constantly spinning as I would only use it from time to time when editing away on battery. (If anyone has 2 hard drives in their MBP and can let me know if it's possible to sleep the non-OS drive, I would really appreciate it.)

Option 2:
The much simpler solution would be to use a single bus-powered 7200rpm FW 800 drive. Something like this:
eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQM7750GB16/

My big question on this solution would be what running an external drive does to your battery time. Anybody have a rough idea how much editing time I might get?

For my purposes, I think an hour or two would be fine.

Thanks,
Dave

Early 2011 MBP
17" i7 8 GB ram

I use the OWC On-The-Go drive. About an hour and a half is all I get from my 17" MBP with this drive plugged in.

BenB wrote: I use the OWC On-The-Go drive. About an hour and a half is all I get from my 17" MBP with this drive plugged in.

Okay, good to know. That's plenty for my current needs. I'll go grab one now.

Thanks,
Dave