Disks

Sleep

Modern hard drives are designed to sleep after a certain period of inactivity. This is to conserve energy and is also considered by some to increase the useful life of the drive by reducing wear. In standby mode, the hard drive is in a state of low energy consumption and its platters have ceased to sleep. It is waiting for a read or write instruction, at which time the hard drive will awake up it's platters to perform the operation. It can generally take about 10 seconds for a hard drive to wake up once in standby mode.

The sleep settings can be used to decide how long the disk(s) should be idle before they are “put to sleep”. The sleep settings apply to all internal and external disks.

To set sleep behavior:

  1. Choose Power adapter or battery in the drop-down menu.
  2. Use the slider to set idle time before sleep .
  3. Done!

If Cocktail is run on a PowerBook, iBook or an MacBook the sleep settings can be applied to both the power adapter and the battery power. For maximum battery life set the shortest sleep time you can (a side effect of this may be that some media cards may unmount improperly). To avoid constant hard drives sleep and awake delays set the sleep time to “Never” (if your disk(s) will not go to sleep, there may be USB devices or background applications preventing sleep).

Allow power button to put the computer to sleep

Sleep the machine when power button is pressed. If disabled, the "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?" with the Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shut Down options will come up when the power button is pressed.

Disable hibernate mode

Hibernation dumps the contents of RAM to a large file on the hard disk when a Mac is put to sleep or runs out of battery. Turning this feature off will prevent that file from being created. The downside to this is that if a Mac runs out of battery life, you will not be able to resume instantly where things left off – in other words, keep Auto-Save enabled and save your documents when you're nearing the end of battery life.

Standby delay

Specifies the delay (in minutes) before writing the hibernation image to disk and powering off memory for standby. This setting is only available on compatible computers.