Command line access to OSX Energy Saver "Put Drives to Sleep"?

Question

Command line access to OSX Energy Saver "Put Drives to Sleep"?

I'm wondering what the "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" setting in Energy Saver preferences is doing to hard drives -- and how it interrelates with Advanced Power Management settings in a drive's firmware.

I'm wondering if there is a command line version of what Energy Saver is doing, with more advanced controls.

I'm wondering how the Energy Saver functionality compares/relates to what this utility does (open source available for your perusal):

http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/

Posted on Jul 6, 2009 3:21 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 6, 2009 10:17 AM in response to GenericName123

GenericName123 wrote:
I'm wondering if there is a command line version of what Energy Saver is doing, with more advanced controls.

Try

man pmset

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Answer 2

Jul 6, 2009 2:13 PM in response to Michael Conniff

Try man pmset

Thanks. That seems to let you alter the number of minutes-to-sleep from the Energy Saver default of 10 minutes.

But I'm still wondering how this interrelates with the hard disk's firmware. The hdapm app isn't controlling pmset -- it's directly communicating with the drive somehow.

One of the hard drive sleep problems that many people are having is laptop drives spinning down too frequently -- and if pmset were overriding the disk's firmware setting (as hdapm seems to do), you'd think that the spindown would only be occurring at Energy Saver's 10-minute intervals. Though maybe on laptops the Energy Saver default is faster than that (10 min is the default on my desktop).

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