External drive spin-down

[bxf]

Although the hard drive on my laptop spins down when my machine goes
into STANDBY, my external USB drive does not. Should it? How?

thanks.

 

[Mikey]

Interesting -- mine (Western Digital 160 GB, brand new) seems to
after a few minutes of inactivity. (I'm basing my conclusion on the
sound.)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?"
"My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters."
"The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."

Maybe there's a jumper on the drive that lets you choose to have the drive spin
down after a few minutes of inactivity, or stay on indefinately? It seems to me
though, that it'd be better for the drive (save wear & tear) if it spun down
after a few minutes of inactivity.

 

[Stan Brown]

We are talking anout a USB drive, yes? If so, does the drive also spin
down in accordance with time specified in Power Settings?

Yes, a USB drive, model number WD1600B015-RNN. My Power settings say
to turn off hard disk after 5 minutes, but until you posed your
query it never occurred to me that that would apply to external hard
disks as well. I'm not unhappy about it.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?"
"My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters."
"The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."
"I was misinformed."

 

[Stan Brown]

Interesting -- mine (Western Digital 160 GB, brand new) seems to
after a few minutes of inactivity. (I'm basing my conclusion on the
sound.)

I've already answered the first query: yes, this is an external USB
drive. But apparently there was a flurry of interest, so I've dug up
the user manual from the install disk (which wasn't actually needed
to run the drive).

Spin-down: the manual says after 10 minutes of inactivity; my Power
Management settings say after 5 minutes. Tonight I let it go, and it
took about 10 minutes (definitely more than 5).

The manual has to be taken with a grain of salt. It also says the
drive is preformatted as a single FAT32 partition, and in the same
paragraph says FAT32 partitions are limited to 32GB! (It's a 160GB
drive. XP's Properties says it's FAT32 all right, one big 160 GB
volume. Partition Magic says the drive's clusters are 32K big.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?"
"My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters."
"The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."
"I was misinformed."