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 30 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”. Cocktail
modifies the same power management settings that Energy Saver modifies. When the “Put the hard drive to sleep when
possible” option in the Energy Saver preference pane is selected, the disk(s) will sleep after ten minutes of inactivity.
This means that enabling the "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preference pane is equal
to setting the sleep time in Cocktail to ten minutes and disabling it is equal to setting the sleep time in Cocktail
to “Never”. The sleep settings apply to all internal and external disks.
To set sleep behavior:
If Cocktail is run on a PowerBook, iBook, MacBook or an MacBook Pro 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).
Other sleep settings
Cocktail will also let you configure if you want your Mac to wake up from sleep when the lid is opened or when the power source is changed.