Pimp My MacBook Pro! – connection questions

[Mike Parfit]

I have been using USB2 to playback DV and HDV with relatively few problems for basic editing, where occasional dropped frames are not disastrous. The issue with the Seagate is entirely different. I just received this from the Seagate tech support about my external drive:

Seagate External Hard Drives are designed to spin down or go to sleep
after about 5 minutes of inactivity. This is to extend the operation life
of the hard drive. There is no way to disable this feature.

This is the same for either a USB connection or firewire. Setting the computer’s sleep preferences has no impact on this.

This makes these drives impossible to use for playback even in the firewire configuration unless the entire program is on that one disk or it’s shorter than five minutes. I am trying to come up with something in the background to keep the disk running (looping a long soundless itunes clip, or something that just hits the disk for a second every four minutes?) but so far I can only use the thing for archives.

Good luck,

Mike