A Fix for External Drives on Macs Going to Sleep...

It's been a frustrating few months while my Mac has suddenly decided to put one single external drive to sleep after a few minutes of disuse.  It wouldn't be that much of an issue if it wouldn't cause the drive to become unwritable once put to sleep and reawakened.

The "fix" was to turn off the drive and start it back up again. What a terrible thing to do to a hard drive! Not to mention the time wasted for it to spin back up, mount, and of course, go back to sleep!

Which causes a host of other problems, like freezing the computer when trying to read from a sleeping drive.

There's a setting in System>Power Management>Put Hard Drives to Sleep.  Usually, you turn to that setting to fix this problem.  Which did not do anything at all in this case.  

The solution circumvents this system setting by using an applet/script called Keep Drive Spinning.  It does two simple things:

And will provide you with a menu of your plugged in drives.  Click the drive you want, and enter the number of seconds you want your mac to remind the drive to stay awake.  60 seconds is the default.  I went went that.

No more annoying spin ups, freezing, or problems writing.  Say I want to change the settings, just run the applet, change the seconds or tell the computer it's safe to put this drive to sleep.

I'm sure there's another photog out there cursing his mac for the exact same reason I was.  Hope this helps them out too!