Thursday, March 31, 2011

Keeping Hard Drives Spinning for Free (and fun)

I've been "in the field", literally on-location and during setups I get bored. No internet per se, and not many games on the laptop I have sitting here. I've noticed that the external hard drives here will spin down after 5mins or so of inactivity and it's annoying to have to wait for them to spin up when I decide to do something in FCP, so I tried a few things to keep them spinning.

There are things out there like Disksomnia which are FREE and work but if you don't have internet and are as bored as I am you wanna start messing around.

One simple (yet fairly inefficient) solution I found was to have Quicktime Player loop a file that's placed on the drive that's spinning down.

1. In FCP drop in an audio Slug. Video Generators > Slug
2. Export it as an .aiff to the hard drive that keeps spinning down.
3. Open it in Quicktime Player and set it to loop (Command + L).
4. Hide Quicktime Player (Command + H).

It's not efficient because while it works silently in the background it will eat up a significant bit of CPU if you check it with Activity Monitor; but still, it's free and something that can be done with (arguably if you have the now optional QT7 install, installed) what you already have.

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