02-22-2010, 05:59 AM
deckeda wrote:
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.
I don't mind if the fan kicks in when the drive is being used. I just don't want the fan going when I'm not using the drive. The computer is in the bedroom so my main concern is the noise it makes when the mini is asleep.
deckeda wrote:
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.
Yeah, I'd rather let time machine do it's thing and do the hourly backups, instead of having one more step that can fail mounting/unmounting the drive.
olnacl wrote:
I have a couple VANTEC NST-360SU-BL Aluminum 3.5" eSATA& USB 2.0 External Enclosures and they spin down when the computer sleeps. I don't know whether the USB only or FW/USB combos do the same, but I suspect they might.
Thanks for the info, at that price if the miniStack spin down when the mini sleeps it might be worth the extra money for the integrated hub.