MacNoob

External hard drives have been a challenge for me on my Mac.  I’m pretty well-versed in the Windows “plug and play” methodology, but OS X either hides configuration options from the user or I’m too ignorant to know how to find them.

As you might have read in one of my previous posts, I love the eSATA interface for its speed.  I’m such a backup freak that having an external device working at near bus speed is a real timesaver.  It makes copying large amounts of data almost painless.  It’s such a nice feeling to know that if my Macbook’s internal drive dies, I have a fresh, bootable duplicate ready to use at a moment’s notice.

My problem with external hard drives on my Mac is one of control.  More specifically, how long is the inactive period before the disk spins down to save power?  When it does spin down, how do you wake it up?  I’ve had continual problems with disks falling “asleep” and not being able to wake them.  This leads to all sorts of Finder beachballs and other application errors trying to read or write to a disk OS X thinks is awake but is really in some near-comatose state.  Windows has a nice set of tools for managing these devices in the properties applet within Device Manager.  Even more settings are available in the Power Settings applet in Control Panel.  Between the two you can define in minutes how long a particular external drive is inactive before it spins down and optimize that drive for speed or quick removal.  OS X doesn’t offer this level of control.  There is a single checkbox in the Energy Saver portion of System Preferences.

There’s also an application buried in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools called SpindownHD.

It only seems to offer a global setting for all the drives on your Mac.  To try and resolve the MyBook sleepiness, I unchecked the Energy Saver checkbox and the “Disk sleeps after..” checkbox in SpindownHD.  This had no effect on my eSATA attached MyBook Studio.  I tried lengthening the “sleep after” time.  Still no good.  I downloaded and installed the latest firmware from Western Digital, no workie either.

The Workaround
The problem seemed to lie within the eSATA interface.  The MyBook Studio I’m using has a triple interface (USB, Firewire and eSATA) so as an experiment, I ejected the disk and reconnected it using the firewire interface.  After unchecking both the above-mentioned checkboxes, the MyBook doesn’t go to sleep any more, even now after I’ve switched back to the eSATA connection.  I’m still looking for a better solution.  WD and Apple don’t seem to offer one that I can find.  Is there anyone out there willing to help this noob?

Maybe I’m dense, but I can’t seem to get network shares, wired or wireless to work consistently in Leopard.  When I was using Tiger everything just worked.  I could connect to network-attached storage, shared folders on other PCs (Windows, Mac or Linux) shared printers, everything.  Leopard is a different animal though.  Pardon the pun.  Sometimes, I double-click on a network share in Finder and I’m connected like normal.  Sometimes though, the shared device doesn’t even show up.  Other times, I can connect, use the share but then it inexplicably disappears.  Every now and then I have to use the Go: Connect to server… menu to manually connect to a share.  Every Windows PC on my network seems fat, dumb and happy.  Vista and XP can see and use everything.  My neighbor still runs Tiger on his Macbook, and it works perfectly on his network and mine.  I’m not completely clueless when it comes to networking, I’m a MCSE, but there is obviously something going on behind the scenes in Leopard that I haven’t figured out yet.  Am I alone?  What about all this “Out of the box useability” Apple braggs about?