Seagate external HD sleep

[matthewmwarren]

I have a Seagate 300Gb external USB/Firewire harddrive that I use to
store multimedia files on. It's become a nuicance because it goes to
sleep / spins down after a short period of inactivity and then when
accessed again, takes 15 or so seconds to 'wake up'.
Is there a setting in Windows that can change the drive setting so that
the drive doesn't go into sleep so soon? Maybe a utlility from Seagate?

thanks in advance.

matt

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a Seagate 300Gb external USB/Firewire harddrive that I use to
store multimedia files on. It's become a nuicance because it goes to
sleep / spins down after a short period of inactivity and then when
accessed again, takes 15 or so seconds to 'wake up'.
Is there a setting in Windows that can change the drive setting so that
the drive doesn't go into sleep so soon? Maybe a utlility from Seagate?

thanks in advance.

As far as I know this can be disabled. But it requires the disk
to be connected via (S)ATA, i.e. you will have to remove the
disk from its enclosure. Under Linux disabling would be done
with "hdparm -Z /dev/<disk>". Under Windows try to get the
right utility from the Seagate Website. They should offer
something.

Arno

 

[dbubd]

I would have never thought to take it apart but it makes sense that SG
uses drives similar to their standard intenal drives in their external
units. I did get a respnse from SG tech support

" This feature is designed to increase the life of the hard drive. It
unfortunately can not be turned off or modified, and the only way
around
it would be to have something that continually accesses the drive.
However
please be advised that it is not something that we will support and
doing
that can cause your drive to overheat and fail. "

You figure since these drives show up under fixed disks in 'My
Computer' that they would adhere to the power management settings.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I would have never thought to take it apart but it makes sense that SG
uses drives similar to their standard intenal drives in their external
units. I did get a respnse from SG tech support

" This feature is designed to increase the life of the hard drive. It
unfortunately can not be turned off or modified, and the only way
around
it would be to have something that continually accesses the drive.
However
please be advised that it is not something that we will support and
doing
that can cause your drive to overheat and fail. "

You figure since these drives show up under fixed disks in 'My
Computer' that they would adhere to the power management settings.

Agreed. Microsoft is hiding a limitation here. Likely in order not
to trouble the user with any nasty details. The underlying problem
is that the USB people did not use the IDE command set, but the
SCSI command set for storage devices. This means pretty much any
of them work, but it also means that operations not directly
related to reading or writing bytes from/to the disk is not
supported.

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I would have never thought to take it apart but it makes sense that SG
uses drives similar to their standard intenal drives in their external
units. I did get a respnse from SG tech support

" This feature is designed to increase the life of the hard drive.

Hard drive may actually mean the full external drive package here,
not the internal drive itself and the sleep behaviour controlled by
the USB->IDE bridge, nothing else.

It unfortunately can not be turned off or modified, and the only way
around it would be to have something that continually accesses the drive.
However please be advised that it is not something that we will support
and doing that can cause your drive to overheat and fail. "

You figure since these drives show up under fixed disks in 'My
Computer' that they would adhere to the power management settings.

Usually that is limited to CPU chipset controlled IDE drives.
Blame IBM/Microsoft.