Time Machine and external harddrives spinning down

[GhettoFob]

I'm trying to use a 400 gig WD MyBook for Time Machine. What I'm noticing is that the MyBook will spin down after about 10 minutes of inactivity. Time machine appears to run every hour or so and it spins up the MyBook. I plan on leaving my Mac on most of the time so it's probably not a good thing if it needs to do this 24 times a day. One suggestion I saw was to create some sort of Automator task which accesses the MyBook every so many minutes to prevent it from spinning down. Does anyone know of a way to configure Time Machine to run less frequently? Perhaps every six hours? Thanks.

 

[GhettoFob]

This seems to be what I was looking for: linky

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

I don't quite get it. The initial use of Time Machine, Leopard loads everything to the external hard drive. Then it just does incremental updates to files that have been changed over time. It doesn't do a full load every time.

 

[GhettoFob]

It does do that. I was concerned with my external drive spinning up and spinning down every hour to perform the small backup. I thought this was a bad thing for hard drives.

 

[TheStu]

Last I heard, the bad things for hard drives are generally limited to low power, too much power, shock damage, or moving it around while running. Using the drive is not considered bad... even if it is intermittently.

 

[aphex]

If its any consolation, i've had two external drives hooked into my mac mini for over two years, both spin down when not in use and back up when i use them (quite often). Haven't had a single problem yet.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: aphex
If its any consolation, i've had two external drives hooked into my mac mini for over two years, both spin down when not in use and back up when i use them (quite often). Haven't had a single problem yet.

basically

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Are those 2 USB drives in a RAID setup??

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
Are those 2 USB drives in a RAID setup??

Mine? No, one FW 250gb, the other a 500gb USB

 

[GhettoFob]

Thanks for all the info. I think I'll leave it with the default settings then.