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The last thing you want your media drives to do while you are editing is to spin down and rest … when your editing application has to then access that media the drive has to spin back up and the app might pause or the frames might drop. Not good. If you turn off the “put hard disks to sleep” in the Energy Saver pane of system preferences then this is supposed to stop but it doesn’t always work. I’ve seen a couple of systems that have had particular issues with this while using G-Tech G-RAID drives.

Digital Heaven has just released a tiny little freeware application to address this problem: Disksomnia. From the Digital Heaven website:

Disksomnia solves this problem by giving external disks a gentle poke every five minutes if Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express is running.

After installing and launching for the first time, Disksomnia is totally automatic and works invisibly in the background. There are no settings, no need to launch the app manually and best of all…no more sleeping disks.

There is no direct download link so you go to the Disksomnia page, enter your email and a link will be sent. Install, run, and no more sleeping disks while running Final Cut Pro. The app appears to keep running after you’ve quit FCP so it could also be used to keep drives from spinning down while working in other editing apps like Avid or Adobe Premiere.

UPDATE: I just got some info from Martin Baker of Digital Heaven … After Disksomnia launches it adds itself to the login items in your System Preferences > Accounts pane. With that it only needs to be launched once and it will then start-up each time you log in with that account. If you decide you don’t want it to launch on start-up anymore, just remove it from the login items.

UPDATE #2: After emailing with Martin again about this application he said this: “even though Disksomnia does run in the background all the time, it only pokes the external disks when it finds that FCP or FCE is running. This means it won’t work with Avid or Premiere (unless FCP/FCE is running at the same time of course).” So there ya go, straight from the application’s creator!