Stop WD MyBook sleeping every 5-10 minutes?

isofa

Is there anyway to stop a WD MyBook (Win XP Pro, firewire connection) from sleeping/spinning down every 10ish minutes of inactivity. It's annoying and will no doubt cause undue wear to the drive.

Are there any windows tools available to edit the sleep settings on the drive?

John_Gray

Well, Wikipedia says:
"In addition to the book-like design, the My Book Essential Edition drives have an Intelligent Power Management feature that stops the drive platters after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to."

I think you're going to have to say what model you have, because I can't find anything obvious via Google. Is there no information supplied with it that would enable you to turn off this power-saving option?

isofa

It's a 500GB MyBook Premium (USB and Firewire), I've had it since it was launched, so it must be around 4 years old.

I found a couple of threads with info to run a Cron job on Mac OS X to keep a file alive every 5 mins (I do also run Macs, but this one is exclusively used on a PC), and other than that I can't find a solution. There is no software that alters the behaviour that came with the drive (WD button manager doesn't have any options), and on the WD support site, these is a "spindown" application (WD_External_Spindown_1-00 - http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=102&lang=en), but this only allows you to spin it down when required, not to change the interval. Very annoying!

I did find a complex set of PERL scripts ages ago, which did something similar, but it was very convoluted, and didn't appear easy to enable and disable, with the potential of upsetting the firmware!

Marty_J

Is there nothing in the Windows Power Management options?

hells_2

^^ what he said

Surely you can stop it going into sleep mode and change the power options to run at all times.

isofa

^^ No it has no effect on the external firewire drive, at least not in my XP Pro SP-3.

My power mgt options are set never to spin down HDs, and only to put the entire system in standby after 1 hour, but the WD firewire drive still spins down every 10 mins of inactivity.

There are no separate settings for external drives (nor specific drives), and there are no properties which pertain to this for the actual drive in question under Windows either.

mr_fishbulb

Have a read here - http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-stop-your-external-hard-disk-from-going-into-sleep-mode/

It's a tool which writes a file to the drive every X minutes to keep it awake.

isofa

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

Have a read here - http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-stop-your-external-hard-disk-from-going-into-sleep-mode/

It's a tool which writes a file to the drive every X minutes to keep it awake.

Great find, will give it a try! Thanks.

isofa

^ Works a treat been running it for a couple of hours, keeps the drive perfectly awake. Not sure why it needs to use 15MB of RAM when on the taskbar, but it's worth the overhead to save the drive wearing itself out!

Thanks again mr_fishbulb!

mr_fishbulb

No problem I found it when my Seagate external hard drive keep freezing my system because it wasn't spinning up fast enough.