02-22-2010, 12:15 AM
I would expect an external FireWire drive to spin down when unmounted. A USB probably not. But as for spinning down when the Mac is sleeping, I can't say for sure. Doubtful.
Get a fanless enclosure if noise is a concern. The miniStack is noisy when the fan kicks in; mine will kick in most of the time. My old Maxtor One Touch III is pretty quiet even though it has a fan.
You can limit the time a drive spins (and maybe its fan, too, if triggered by heat) by only mounting the drive when doing a backup. This is only really practical when doing a backup say, once a day.
I had mine automated by having an iCal alarm run each morning. It would wake the Mac and run a shell script that would mount my backup drive. TimeMachineEditor had Time Machine configured to run about a minute later than the alarm. After about 10 minutes another iCal alarm would run another shell script that unmounted the drive. This permitted the drive to remain connected but never spin or mount when not needed.
Get a fanless enclosure if noise is a concern. The miniStack is noisy when the fan kicks in; mine will kick in most of the time. My old Maxtor One Touch III is pretty quiet even though it has a fan.
You can limit the time a drive spins (and maybe its fan, too, if triggered by heat) by only mounting the drive when doing a backup. This is only really practical when doing a backup say, once a day.
I had mine automated by having an iCal alarm run each morning. It would wake the Mac and run a shell script that would mount my backup drive. TimeMachineEditor had Time Machine configured to run about a minute later than the alarm. After about 10 minutes another iCal alarm would run another shell script that unmounted the drive. This permitted the drive to remain connected but never spin or mount when not needed.