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Specify hard drive spin down times in Jaguar.

OSXFAQ Reader Tip By Lee Bennett

10.2 eliminated the slider to choose how long before your hard drive spins down for power management and offering, instead, just a checkbox to spin the drive down when possible. The tip is that those who don't fear Terminal can not only specify how long before it spins down, but can also have different settings depending on whether they're getting power from the charger or from a battery.

The command is:

pmset -a spindown 60

The line must be run as root (preceeding with 'sudo' should do the trick). The -a variable sets the time for all power scenarios. Using -b instead sets the time only for battery power and -c sets the time when power is supplied by the charger. The last variable, obviously, is the number of minutes desired.

Lastly, according to the pmset man page,

"All changes made through pmset are saved in a persistent preferences file (per-system, not per-user) at /var/db/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.xml"

This tidbit answered my own question as to whether the Terminal command needed to be issued at each login.

It doesn't.

Enjoy :-)

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