Removing hard drive power save function

[Fullforceeventsltd]

I have just purchased a Segate 1tb external drive for back up.

Any ideas how to remove the annoying power save function that this drive has?

Here is a link to the drive
http://www.maplin.co.uk/1tb-seagate-...d-drive-257315

Cheers,
Steve.

[DazzyD]

I had the same "problem" with a Maxtor drive. It would go in to standby mode if not accessed for a few minutes and took a fair while to recover. I'd also be interested to hear a solution!

[katman]

I had the same "problem" with a Maxtor drive. It would go in to standby mode if not accessed for a few minutes and took a fair while to recover. I'd also be interested to hear a solution!

Take a look at this thread, may be of some help

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/sle...-t3712676.html

[Daryll]

Now I may be wrong , but a lot of newer drives have a hidden partition , which has the manufacturers software , such as the power down utility.

you will need a little bit of software such as.....

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-...l-Format-Tool/

This will show all partitions on the drive , this is a one way ticket , non reversible.
After you have low level formatted the hidden partition , format the drive to whatever you want FAT32 , NTFS etc , fingers crossed , no more problems.
I have used this method on a Maxtor 500gb drive with great results , and no problems.

Daryll

[Fullforceeventsltd]

Cheers guys. Will take a look at that a bit later.

[DazzyD]

Now I may be wrong , but a lot of newer drives have a hidden partition , which has the manufacturers software , such as the power down utility.

you will need a little bit of software such as.....

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-...l-Format-Tool/

This will show all partitions on the drive , this is a one way ticket , non reversible.
After you have low level formatted the hidden partition , format the drive to whatever you want FAT32 , NTFS etc , fingers crossed , no more problems.
I have used this method on a Maxtor 500gb drive with great results , and no problems.

Daryll

Never thought that it could be due to programs actually stored on the hard disc. My initial research led me to suspect Windows Power Options settings but it was a bit strange how my older drives don't do this.

However, I would think that reformatting the drive is a bit extreme if said drive is full of your music library. It would take a long time to get everything back on there and up and running again. My research led me to a small utility which runs in the background and regularly writes a small file to the drive - in effect keeping the drive awake. Maybe that would be an easier solution that having to rebuild a gigging hard disc.

[Excalibur]

My research led me to a small utility which runs in the background and regularly writes a small file to the drive - in effect keeping the drive awake. .

My search led me to this.

A lot of external drives, particularly WD, have a power-save feature which spins them down when not used for a while. Hence your problem.

Many are supplied with (or you can download) a software utility that can be used to disable this 'feature'.

If not, and you're running windoze, write a batch script that does a DIR on a particular folder on the external drive every couple of minutes to keep it alive. If OSX, shell script doing an ls / sleep loop will achieve the same.


External is preferable from a portability perspective, and also tipping a nod to ProDub.

I thought we'd had this question before. My portable drives certainly tend to "sleep" when not in constant use, but they will instantly play tracks already loaded. They just take ages to load new tracks.

[equinoxdiscos]

http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/
Worked for me.

[Fullforceeventsltd]

Cheers for that link

[DJ Paulie]

I bought a seagate external drive about 6yrs ago when I first came here from PC world. It apparently has some kind of file integrety checking software where it checks a file before accessing it. If I used it with VDJ it would load one song and play it, then if I loaded another song in the other deck when I switched it would play the first 5/10 secs, then whirr and pause very slightly while it checked it. Most of the time no problem, but occasionally it would stop the playback.

Switched to a 00DJ and never had any problems. I've used a external flash type drive with my HP laptop and not had any problems. (famous last words ! )