[reneherse]

I run an SSD for the system and a HDD (in the optical drive bay) for storage in my (aged) MBP. Any advice to get the HDD to wind down when not in use? This setup is fantastic when plugged in, but battery life suffers with the HDD in the aftermarket location unable to go to sleep...

[aroch]

If I'm going portable and need every last minute of battery life I'll transfer files I need over to my SSH (or to a 64GB SD card if they're very large files) and unmount the platter drive in my MBP

[nwh]

I've never had an issue with getting a HDD in the optical bay to sleep. Just checked the option in the settings and used a tool (CHUB? CHUD?) to set the minimum spindown time to be lower than normal.

[JSadowski]

Yes... swap the two drives. The optical bay cannot properly put the HDD to sleep. I am running a similar setup, but with the HDD in the original bay, and the SSD in the optical bay and have no issues.

[reneherse]

Ah, yes. I think with my machine being a very old model (MBP 4,1) there was some issue for why I didn't do this. Perhaps the maximum speed of the optical bay? I'll have to look up the specs again to see if it wouldn't be worth the trade off, as it would be great to make the old goat more portable. Thanks for the tip!

[nwh]

My original SSD setup didn't actually have any problems in the 2007 model MacBook Pro, so I can't imagine you would either. The speedup is absolutely incredible, even with a cheap Chinese SSD.