Disable or sleep secondary HDD in Macbook

Posted by cpak on Super User See other posts from Super User or by cpak
Published on 2011-03-01T21:29:28Z Indexed on 2011/03/01 23:26 UTC
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Filed under:

mac

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hard-drive

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sleep

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power

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disable

I've done some quick Googling but didn't find an answer. I've put an SSD in my Macbook, and at the same time moved the original HDD to the optical drive bay. I'm running the OS and most of my daily apps off the SDD so the HDD is really just for storing stuff I need now and then.

Now I'd like to disable (as in power off or "force sleep") the HDD when I don't need it. Tried unmounting the disk using diskutil unmountDisk but it kept spinning for like 10 minutes. Maybe that's to be expected, but I'd imagined it would stop instantly on unmount. Also, it would be nice to have it disabled by default, and only mount it (= power on) when I need it.

Grateful for any input on this!

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