Keep Drive Spinning Icon

Keep Drive Spinning

Makes sure that a connected drive never goes to sleep.

Keep Drive SpinningOverview

Keep Drive Spinning ensures that a connected drive never goes to sleep (that is, that it never spins down).

Normally this can be controlled using the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences, and that should be your first resort in dealing with the problem, rather than this or any other third party software. However, some external drives do not respect the System Preferences settings, so for them an alternative like this is needed.

This applet simply creates a launch agent that tells OS X to update a hidden file on the selected drive once every minute so that the drive stays awake.

Launch agents are built-in OS X technology and persist across reboots, etc., so you can run this once to set-it-and-forget-it. You can find the launch agents made by Keep Drive Spinning in the LaunchAgents folder of your user's Library folder.

Users on OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and OS X 10.5 (Leopard) need to run the AppleScript source code directly. This source code is included, and only requires opening the file and then clicking the big, friendly Run button.

NEW

  • Fixes a bug with letting a drive sleep if its name did not match with its POSIX path.
  • If the necessary hidden file on a drive is present but locked, the setup process automatically detects and fixes the problem.
  • Adds a troubleshooting guide and diagnostic script to help those with troublesome drives.
  • Expanded and improved reporting of errors and possible fixes when a drive cannot be kept awake.
  • Better labels for the launch agents.

Keep Drive SpinningInformation

Version
2.6
Date
08.15.15
License
Free
Language
English
File Size
156 KB
Developer
Category
Operating Systems
Mac OS X
System Requirements
  • OS X 10.6 or later
  • OS X 10.4 or later for plain AppleScript version
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