Some external drives for e.g. Western Digital MyBook or Seagate FreeAgent have problems with Energy Saver, they don’t use preference pane in System Preferences on Mac (Leopard / Snow Leopard). First solution is Keep Drive Spinning, its most common and mostly works great. But with my silver Seagate FreeAgent 1TB and Snow Leopard its not working. FreeAgent has a build into firmware information when to put sleep the drive. Default is 3 minutes! There is no any app, any script to deal with this problem. Seagate Tools for Mac has only basic options to manage external drive, but the FreeAgent Software for Windows have this magic option which helps a lot, and it stores inside firmware information when put disk to sleep. Annoying spin on and spin downs disappeared.
Solution for the problem is:
1. Go to FreeAgent Family Downloads download and install FreeAgent software for windows.
2. Open the Seagate FreeAgent Tools application. Click Utilities in the Command panel
3. Click Adjust Drive Sleep Interval. Select an interval from the dropdown menu. (I’ve chose 3hrs)
4. Disconnect your FreeAgent from Windows
5. Plug-it to your Mac and that’s it.
I think it also works for discs shared via Network Access Server (NAS) by routers and operating systems based on the Linux.
This doesn’t work for me… the setting ends up resetting to 3 minutes the next time I plug the drive in :(
Try to disable “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when its possible” in “Energy Saver” in System Preferences.
Hi, I’ve the same problem…I tried to follow your instructions but I can’t find “Utilities” menù :(
SCREENSHOT: http://localhostr.com/files/4f5440/seagatemac.jpg