{"id":13349,"date":"2012-02-22T08:03:34","date_gmt":"2012-02-22T14:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=13349"},"modified":"2014-05-22T13:30:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T18:30:37","slug":"quick-tip-save-battery-by-spinning-down-hard-drive-sooner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/13349-quick-tip-save-battery-by-spinning-down-hard-drive-sooner\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Tip: Save Battery by Spinning Down Hard Drive Sooner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It seems to be a never-ending battle – trying to get the most out of your laptop battery. It always seems like you run out of battery power at the worst possible moment. And as amazingly convenient as the OWC Data Doubler<\/a> makes adding a second drive to your MacBook Pro, that just means you now have two <\/em>drives sucking down power, rather than just one.<\/p>\n

Of course, the easiest thing to do would be to replace any platter-based hard drives with an OWC Solid State Drive<\/a>. Fewer moving parts means less power draw. They also mean less heat, which means the fans run a little less, which also reduces energy consumption.<\/p>\n

However, for storing all your data, platter-based drives still have the best cost-per-gigabyte ratio. That\u2019s why many people have chosen to install one of each in their MacBook Pros with a Data Doubler<\/a>; which solves the storage\/performance problem, but doesn\u2019t do much for your battery.<\/p>\n

The next logical place to look is in your Energy Saver preference pane. Depending on your MacBook Pro model, there are options to tick for \u201cbetter battery life\u201d or \u201chigher performance,\u201d as well as a number of sliders to adjust display and computer sleep. There\u2019s also a box to \u201cPut the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.\u201d Checking this one spins down the drive after about 10 minutes of inactivity.<\/p>\n

However, that\u2019s a while before any energy savings kick in. Fortunately, OWC customer Andrew Bodenstein<\/strong> wrote in to remind us that there\u2019s a way to adjust this in the Terminal, using the pmset<\/code><\/span> utility. This utility controls power management options, similarly to the Energy Saver control panel, but with a greater level of detail. We\u2019re going to focus on just changing the disk sleep time.<\/p>\n

A quick entering of man pmset<\/code><\/span> into the Terminal will give us a full listing of all the commands and arguments we can use to change things using pmset. We\u2019ll save you the trouble, though, and give you just what you need to adjust the spindown time. The command you\u2019ll want to enter is:<\/p>\n

sudo pmset -a disksleep 5<\/code><\/span><\/p>\n

Because you should never<\/em> just blindly enter in a Terminal command without knowing what it does, I\u2019m going to break this command down piece-by-piece.<\/p>\n