Firewire 800 Enclosure Beeping - Sleep/Park

[Torell]

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DabbaTZhN5s
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmfIuLC1JDE

Sorry for the poor quality, I used my Blackberry Curve as I have nothing else one me. I need help trying to figure this out.

I have a Seagate 320gb 7200.10 hard drive inside a Vantec Nexstar 3 NST-360FBSU-BK enclosure and use firewire800 to connect it to my Macbook Pro. Anyway here are the scenarios that happen.

Power settings are set to NOT power down disks, on Battery and AC power.

1. Computer is idle, Hard drive in enclosure spins down, beach ball and won't work until I manually cut power to enclosure.

2. Computer is idle, Hard drive in enclosure spins down, beeps repetitively (see Part 2 Youtube video for frequency of sound), beach ball and won't work and won't stop beeping until I manually cut power.

3. Computer in use. Eject disks, then I hear one or a couple beeps, everything is normal (Part 1).

4. Computer in use. Eject disks, then I hear multiple beeps, see Part 2

So I'm brainstorming here, but I believe the Hard drives are spinning down regardless of the power settings. I googled it and looks like people have used cronjobs to touch a hidden file every so often to keep the discs spinning (Western Digital MyBooks suffer from this). So I found this applet on macupdate called "Keep Drive Spinning v1.1" which I haven't fully tested yet. I have two partitions on the enclosure so I set the app to touch both. The Mac partition every 30 seconds and the Windows partition every 60 seconds.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/31158/keep-drive-spinning

So hopefully this will prevent scenarios 1 and 2 from happening but what about scenarios 3 and 4? Does the Oxford 934DSB chip not do a good job of parking the head? Or does my Seagate drive have some sort of weird parking scheme as well. Or maybe the combination of the two. I'm pretty sure this is not a Hard drive failure since it's still running fine for a couple months.

I'm curious to see if the Rosewill enclosures with the Oxford 924DSB chipset suffer from the same problem. Or the OWC enclosures as well.

 

[Torell]

Just tried something else

The applet keeps the drives from spinning down, but if the computer goes to sleep on it's own, while the drives are connected via firewire, same problem happens, (Part 2) If I wake up the computer and try and access the external drive, it says there's a problem.

 

[Torell]

UPDATE: Did anyone know this because I couldn't find anything

So I did some tests with the USB connection as well.

In Mac OSX, when you eject the drive using USB, the platters actually stop spinning. The cable is still plugged in, and the power is still on. When you unplug the USB cable from the Macbook Pro, the platters start spinning again...

On WinXP, when you eject the drive it doesn't park until a couple of seconds after you eject. Then the platters stop spinning. I hear it when I press my ear to the drive. Same thing happens when you unplug the USB cable, the platters will start spinning up again.

Funny enough, using USB does not produce beeping noises when ejecting the enclosure. This is baffling.

Can someone confirm this to be the case with their enclosures?

 

[Torell]

BRAINSTORM:

I took the Hard drive out of the enclosure, and plugged it into my XP machine and ran HDTune on it

HD Tune: ST3320620AS Information

Firmware version : 3.AAE
Serial number : 5QF2JMES
Capacity : 298.1 GB (~320.1 GB)
Buffer size : 16384 KB
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-7 - SATA II
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

S.M.A.R.T : yes
48-bit Address : yes
Read Look-Ahead : yes
Write Cache : yes
Host Protected Area : yes
Device Configuration Overlay : yes
Automatic Acoustic Management: no
Power Management : yes
Advanced Power Management : no
Power-up in Standby : no
Security Mode : yes
Firmware Upgradable : yes

Partition : 1
Drive letter : H:\
Label : MAC
Capacity : 239061 MB
Usage : 22.29%
Type : NTFS
Bootable : No

Partition : 2
Drive letter : I:\
Label : WIN
Capacity : 66183 MB
Usage : 0.24%
Type : FAT32
Bootable : No

Now I'm wondering if you can't just plug in any old SATA2 drive into an enclosure. The Seagate doesn't support Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM), Advanced Power Management (APM), or Power-up in Standby (PUIS). Where my Western Digital WD1600AAJS-00PSA supports everything except APM, and my Hitachi HDT721010SLA supports everything.

Doesn't explain why connecting to USB would park fine... maybe there is a distinct differences in power management between MAC and WIN alongside either Firewire and USB. I can't find anything technical on google.

 

[Torell]

... mods, is this in the wrong forum?