Well Apple, I’m a little frustrated.  Due to running out of room, on my internal, I have moved my tunes and pics to an external hdd.  It’s a Seagate 1 tb and it sleeps after about 15 minutes, so I get the beach ball when accessing my data.  Reading stuff on forums, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution to stop this.  I found this article from 2001 about using cron command to keep it awake, but not sure about that. Any ideas?
Also, changing out the hdd for a larger one doesn’t look to simple either.  I have added and changed them in pc’s before, but am not crazy about this. 
Dave, it seems like this would be a good show topic.  I can email you a voice memo if you like.
Any thoughts on which way to go?  Thanks.

Cron has been deprecated by Apple since, I think, Tiger. Automatic running of stuff is handled by Launch Daemon (launchd and its very good friend launchctl, from memory). I’m at work right now and not in a position to point you at any tutorials about how to set it up, but that’s how things are done these days.

As for your internal drive, what computer do you have? an iMac? how big is it? and how much %age space do you have left? There are ways of swapping it yourself as you have seen (as long as you don’t mind breaking your warranty), but I agree, it’s not that straight forward. Again I don’t have immediate access to my Mac at home, but I do have an application which trawls through main drive getting rid of all the foreign language parts getting rid of them - that can free up many megs, which can be a help. I’ll check this evening.

I have the 20” imac-almost 3 years old now with a 250GB hdd.  Cramming everything on the internal isn’t an option anymore.

Well, I also posted this question here and got a solution that worked.  Post here if anyone else does this, I’m curious how it works for you.

Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier - I ended up trying to sort a 18gb file at work (475 million rows) and it took forever, so I left it, went home and cooked dinner (roast sirloin, Jersey Benne potatoes and stir-fried vegetables, with a bottle of rosé from Langedoc). Lucky I had 60gb of free space on the network work drive.

Anyway, here’s what I use when I want to give myself a bit of extra space: http://delocalizer.mac.findmysoft.com/

It was written for OS X 10.2, but I can confirm that it still works fine in 10.6. Except for one game: Spore. If you have that, copy the application to an extra drive, run Delocalizer and bring it back again.

It goes through each application on your main drive and gets rid of the selected language portions, and as I said can save you many megabytes. It may give you some breathing room.

Oh, BTW, your link is broken…

PS There’s also CleanMyMac. I haven’t tried it and don’t know about its efficacy.

Sorry about the link, not sure what’s going on with the site.  It’s Revenge of the Twit forum.  I went there without being logged in and didn’t see it either.  Thanks for the info Laurie.
I used lingon and basically did this:
name a text file called “nothing.pl” using TextWrangler or BBedit. you can also use TextEdit if you change the Preference to text file.

paste the line below and save:
#this does nothing

put this on your Desktop
now open the command line.
type:
cd /Desktop
chmod 777 nothing.pl

now drag that file to your external drive

open lingon

make a new Users Daemons
in the run field put something not exactly like this:
/Volumes/externaldrive/scripts/nothing.pl

select run it every 9 minutes.

save.

log out and log in.

Ah, lingon - that was what I was trying to remember. But I’d never used it for anything useful. And you have. Nice work. (or nice find, if you prefer)

Yes, I prefer “nice find”. ;\ 
John Foster gave me the tip, he’s done some podcasting in the past, including a mac one.