Prevent Drobo Spin Down on Mac OS X

Aside from the fan noise the only real issue I have with my Drobo is waiting for it to spin up. After 15 minutes of inactivity the Drobo spins down its drives, ignoring any OS settings that tell it to do otherwise. This got old quickly so I put together a launch agent to keep the drive active:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.alloysoft.DroboKeepAlive</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/bin/ls</string>
        <string>/Volumes/Drobo</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartInterval</key>
    <integer>600</integer>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/dev/null</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/dev/null</string>
</dict>
</plist>

This will access the Drobo volume every ten minutes and stop it from spinning down. To install, download the plist and place it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Then either reboot or enter the following in Terminal:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alloysoft.DroboKeepAlive.plist

Note that if you’ve named the volume something other than “Drobo” you’ll need to modify the plist file to point to the correct path.