Setting Disk Sleep Timers problems with FCP4.5?

Question

Level 1

80 points

Setting Disk Sleep Timers problems with FCP4.5?

Still experiencing trouble when Printing-To-Tape projects that are over 30 min in length. It usually stops at around 26 minutes. I head something about Disk Sleep Timers. I checked my Mac under About This Mac>More Info>Power...I found that my Disk Sleep Timer is set to 10 minutes and System Sleep Timer is set to 180 minutes. Could this be the problem? Should I reset my Disk Sleep Timer to a longer time? If so, how can I do this?

Also, other mentioned something about Journaling on the disks? What is that? Should they be on or off? How can I check. Please help.

Posted on Nov 6, 2005 11:55 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Studio X

Level 7

27,229 points

Nov 6, 2005 12:08 PM in response to Luis Guereca

Luis,

You will want to set your sleep to never, screen savers to None, and disk spindown to never.

This is a way to set the disks to never:

In Terminal type:
sudo pmset spindown x
then type your pass word
x=the number of minutes that you want till your drive spins down.
0 is never

More info on using pmset here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1. html

And I found this here
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
Do a command f and search for "pmset" that is where i first found this.

Note that this is a more 'controlled' way of Putting the hard disk to sleep than possible in

system preferences>energy saver>sleep>Put the hard disk to sleep when possible

In that situation, checked means x=10 and unchecked means, not 0 but 180 minutes.

Also, there are some utilities with a graphical interface that will do this as well.

Good luck.
x

Reply

Answer 2

Luis Guereca Author

Level 1

80 points

Nov 6, 2005 12:21 PM in response to Studio X

I'll do that ASAP. But first, how do I get to Terminal to make these changes?

Reply

Answer 3

Nov 6, 2005 12:37 PM in response to Luis Guereca

boot (system) drive/Applications/Utilities/Terminal

Reply

Answer 4

Luis Guereca Author

Level 1

80 points

Nov 6, 2005 12:49 PM in response to David Harbsmeier

After reading the article on Spinning Beach Ball Of Death (disk spindown) it was extemely helpful. One question... so, does that mean that if I select NEVER for system sleep AND de-select "Put the hard drive to sleep when possible", that it will issue a pmset command with an arguement of...disksleep 0 or spindown 0? Don't I need the issue command to be disksleep 180 or spindown 180?

Reply

Answer 5

Luis Guereca Author

Level 1

80 points

Nov 6, 2005 1:14 PM in response to Luis Guereca

I went the easier route. Instead of typing in the command in the Terminal window, I went to the blue apple>system preferences>energy saver>sleep and de-selected (no check mark) in the option "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible. Above it, I kept the sliders for "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive..." at 3 hours and "Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive..." at 3 hours.

If I put the two above sliders at NEVER and deselect "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep..." will this keep my hard disks to never sleep (standby mode) or will that send the pmset command to still issue a disksleep/spindown of 180? And if my disks never sleep, will that do hard to my computer?

Reply

Answer 6

Nov 6, 2005 1:18 PM in response to Luis Guereca

I kept the sliders for "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive..." at 3 hours and "Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive..." at 3 hours.<<</div>

Its best to set them for NEVER if you're working with FCP on that system. You don't want to system going to sleep while in the middle of an 6 hour export session (it happens). For the monitor, just turn it off if you're going to be away from the computer for a while.

-DH

Reply

Answer 7

Luis Guereca Author

Level 1

80 points

Nov 6, 2005 1:23 PM in response to David Harbsmeier

Thank you all for the help. I'll be testing it next week.

Reply