Tool to generate disk activity

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FrankisGER

Reamed Sphincter
Joined
Jul 2, 2000
Messages
1,066
Hi there,
my external WD drive shuts down after 5 minutes of usage.

I don´t need this.

Are there tools to generate cont. disk acitivity?

Chris
 
Well I would first check your power settings to see if your OS is set to automatically shut off disks while idle before putting your hard drive through that sort of work.
 
Hi,
checked it. No power saving activated. It´s the external controller that shuts down the drive.

Chris
 
Is there a specifc reason you need it to stay spun up? I just googled it and came up dry. I'll keep an eye out.
 
For the biggest part it´s just bugging me to hear drive spin up so often.

For the other part it won´t do the drive good to spin up 20 times a day..

Chris
 
It shouldn't spin down if under Personalisation-Screen Saver->Change power settings->Change plan settings->change advanced power settings->Hard disk---you set turn off "hard disk" to NEVER
 
There is no power saving from the windows or mainboard side active. It seems as if WD built a small controller into the external HD casing that shuts the disk down after a few minutes not being used.

I checked IOMeter. I didn´t get it to work for my problem. Might be my fault.

Maybe that´s a good time to start playing with Visual Basic again..

Chris
 
If this is one of those "green" drives, that's what it's designed to do to conserve power and not waste electricity. If it's not one of those "green" ones, there could be something going on with it or the electronics of the external assembly itself.

I'd still suggest running the manufacturer's diagnostic on it, both the short and long tests and see what results you end up with.
 
There is a green HDD inside the WD Elements ext. HDD..

The standby intervall is as specified.

Chris
 
I am having the same issue with my WD my book cept I have it hooked to my PS3. Once the drive goes to sleep the PS3 no longer recognizes it and you have to physically get up and push the button on the drive to get it to wake back up. It's very annoying. When I purchased the drive I was under the assumption that the drive would only go to sleep when the computer went to sleep/shutdown. I never imagined it would go to sleep after 5 mins of inactivity.

As for how to keep it awake, I don't know. I have been looking through various forums and haven't found anything yet. Will report back though if I find something.
 
Take a look at the same place that I mentioned and look if there is any such setting for USB...
 
XS Janus said:
Take a look at the same place that I mentioned and look if there is any such setting for USB...
Click to expand...

It's not windows or anything windows related that is shutting the drive down. The firmware in the hard drive itself is shutting it down. Sadly there isn't any options in the included software for the HD that allow you to change the sleep settings.
 
You could try http://allwaysync.com/

It appears to have a free version, but in my experience with it, it only worked until it had synced a fair number of files (thousands).

Set it to check every 5 min to see if a dummy file has changed on the drive that is synced with that same file on another drive. Since the file never changes, the trial version of allwaysync should not expire and it should keep that drive spun up.
 
Why not just run a scheduled task every 5, 10, 15, whatever minutes to run a "dir" on the root of the drive?
 
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