[geeks] Advice on buying a new Mac

[John Francini]

Actually, the problem there is that some of those Hitachi drives like  
to park their heads the moment they think they're not being used.

There was a Mac utility called APM Tuner X (which I use to this day)  
that allows me to set the threshold at which the drive will park its  
heads.  Since my laptop never goes anywhere (it's a desktop  
replacement), I use APM Tuner X to turn the threshold to the limit  
(which prevents head-parking).

Unfortunately, the developer (Eiji Maekawa) seems to have abandoned  
the program after putting out version 0.1.

John


On 14 Nov 2006, at 13:32, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Tue, 14 Nov 2006 @ 06:45 -0500, Mike F said:
>
>> I don't know about the current generation of Mac Mini, but the  
>> internal
>> drive in my G4 Mini behaves exactly that way, except the tick was  
>> much
>> more often and it would frequently happen just as the disk was being
>> accessed. I know a lot of laptop drives do that, but I never  
>> really knew
>> what it was. However, it annoyed me enough (not so much the sound  
>> as the
>> excruciating pauses) to put a 3.5" drive in a firewire enclosure  
>> and use
>> that as the primary drive. No more "tick" and much better overall
>> responsiveness.
>
> Why can't you just turn the power save features off?
>
> Almost all hard drives support the power saving features, but  
> default to
> having them turned off.
>
> Will the notebook drives not respond to the commands to disable it?
>
> Why would Apple ship drives in a *desktop* that defaulted to power
> saving?  That sounds pretty dumb.
>
> -- 
> shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The grieving lords take ship.  With  
> these
> our very souls pass overseas." -- Exile]
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