Putting drives to sleep when you have SSDs

Macintosh software/hardware discussion and troubleshooting

Moderator: James Steele

Post Reply
Killahurts
Posts: 2186
Joined: Thu Jan 13, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: USA

Putting drives to sleep when you have SSDs

Post by Killahurts »

In My 2010 MP, I've got three Samsung EVOs and one 4TB spinner, in the four drive bays. I only use the spinner for storage and back up, so I thought it might be nice to let it spin down when not in use.. but I don't know of a way to do it individually per drive, it has to be all drives in the Energy Saver settings. I don't know what that would do to my EVOs, if anything, but I sure don't want to risk messing them up- they work so flawlessly for me now. As it has been, my settings are set with the computer and the drives running forever.

Maybe there's a utility I could get that would let me control a specific drive?
Thanks!
DP11, 2019 16-Core Mac Pro, Monterey, 64GB RAM. RME HDSPe MADI FX to SSL Alphalink to SSL Matrix console, and multiple digital sub consoles. UAD Quad PCIe. Outboard stuff.
User avatar
mikehalloran
Posts: 15134
Joined: Sun Jan 25, 2009 5:08 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Sillie Con Valley

Re: Putting drives to sleep when you have SSDs

Post by mikehalloran »

Not an issue. SSDs have a trickle of current when idle for Garbage Collection and the like. They can't go to sleep like a spinner.

What Apple has to say:

[b]Put hard disks to sleep when possible[/b]

This setting powers down the hard drive motor when you aren't reading or writing files from the drive. Solid-state drives (SSDs) don’t have moving parts, so this setting doesn’t affect Mac computers that use only SSDs to store data.

Consider deselecting this option if you have an internal or external non-SSD drive and you use apps—for example, pro audio or video editing software—that work better with continued read and write access to the hard disk.


https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202824
DP 11.31; 828mkII FW, micro lite, M4, MTP/AV USB Firmware 2.0.1
2023 Mac Studio M2 8TB, 192GB RAM, OS Sonoma 14.4, USB4 8TB external, M-Audio AIR 192|14, Mackie ProFxv3 6/10/12; 2012 MBPs Catalina, Mojave
IK-NI-Izotope-PSP-Garritan-Antares, LogicPro X, Finale 27.4, Dorico 5.2, Notion 6, Overture 5, TwistedWave, DSP-Q 5, SmartScore64 Pro, Toast 20 Pro
Killahurts
Posts: 2186
Joined: Thu Jan 13, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: USA

Re: Putting drives to sleep when you have SSDs

Post by Killahurts »

Cool Mike, thanks!

I'm going to turn it on and see how everything behaves. :)
DP11, 2019 16-Core Mac Pro, Monterey, 64GB RAM. RME HDSPe MADI FX to SSL Alphalink to SSL Matrix console, and multiple digital sub consoles. UAD Quad PCIe. Outboard stuff.
Post Reply