Final question for the day, I have heard on numerous occasions that is important to not let your system HD go to sleep, but is it necessary to do the same for the display. Is a screensaver a bad thing too? And what about the G-tech External hard drive, does that have a sleep control function anywhere or is it the end of the world if it does sleep? P.S. - Your quick responses have been so great. Thanks so much C.L. Mike

Hi Mikey... a screensaver is not a bad thing. These days, it's more eye candy than useful though. I prefer to set my displays to go to sleep after 10 minutes but that's a personal choice. It's not the end of the word to set your HDs to go to sleep but it's more useful for laptop users as it preserves battery power. Some actually say that that the spining down of a HD actually increases wear... personally I set my hard drives to never spin down. If you find that your HD still sleep even after unchecking the option in Energy Saver, you can take a trip in the Terminal and use the pmset command like this : "sudo pmset disksleep X" then type your password. X= number of minutes before spindown... 0 = never. Also, you can check under "Apple Menu / About This Mac / More Info / Power" for info about your sleep settings.

I also don't let my disk spin down : I configured it on my system under System Preferences>Energy Saver. Christian's cool superuser trick works too :)

Thanks so much, Still wondering about how I can make sure my External Hard drive won't spin down. Where are the controls for that? mike

Sorry... You set this in Apple Menu / System Preferences / Energy Saver.

Just a polite dissent. :) I have my drive checked to "Sleep Whenever Possible." That's how I received my computer from Apple and I have seen no data to say that their default is harmful or unwise. The stock drive I received with my G4 in 2003 still works and I have never had a drive fail on me. I have six - all Seagate. If anyone has any data that Apples default is wrong I'd love to hear it. I don't want to hurt my precious drives. Very interesting topic. :D

[quote:8016] I have my drive checked to "Sleep Whenever Possible." That's how I received my computer from Apple and I have seen no data to say that their default is harmful or unwise. Very interesting topic. :D[/quote] Don't worry about that too much!!! Actually, some believe that sleep is better for the HD life... I don't think there is any scientific studies that proves one theory or the other. The reason I like to never set my HD to sleep is that I don't like waiting for one of my audio drive to wake up inthe middle of a session... Do as you wish... there is no good or wrong way!