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Western Digital My Book Studio II - 4TB falling alseep
- Thread starter steffi
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^ That shouldn't do anything.
That's odd. WD drives have their own controllers that will spin them down. They shouldn't unmount from your computer though.
That's odd. WD drives have their own controllers that will spin them down. They shouldn't unmount from your computer though.
yeh - you're right (as always), but its worth a shot.
does the drive completely power itself down?
Seems like there is no workaround for this. According to various users of this drive and their contact with WD support, that is just the nature of the drive and I guess it's way of saving power.
my Verbatim drive does the same thing. Its not just on a Mac, it does it on every machine.
saving power? more like damaging the drive! you just cant produce a drive that forces itself to eject, thats when things get damaged
custom built drives ftw?
it was a 20 dollar 320gb drive from bestbuy. I only use it for time machine backups, no need for it to stay constantly mounted. I backup to it once every few days and then set it aside.
Perhaps the firmware controls the unmount. Not too sure though.
Assuming you have this formatted for use in Windows, does the drive also eject itself in a Windows environment?
possibly i guess - but if a file is open on the computer then no firmware will be 100% safe in unmounting files.
or Mac Drive
(for testing purposes)
I have similar issues with a WD green in a generic FW enclosure - my fix (only needed cos it bugged me) was to make a little script that calls smartmontools on the disk and cron it every 10mins or so.
dirty I know, but it gets the job done....
dirty I know, but it gets the job done....
There are a couple of programs that use the same sort of dirty method:
Mac:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/31158/keep-drive-spinning
Win:
http://psichron.za.net/wordpress/2009-11-29/hddcoffee/
However, I'm not sure they'll help with the Western Digital My Book Studio II. There have been several hardware and power supply revisions to the My Book. Apparently the newest versions work best.
I've got one of these drives as well, bought it new about 2 1/2 years ago now and it's a dog.
It does exactly what you describe - spins the drives down to 'save' power and then when your computer needs access, they take so long to spin back up that the computer often decides they have been lost and unmounts them.
I did a lot of searching back when I first got them and found a Western Digital support doc saying that it was the way the unit was built and that there was no way to change the sleep settings.
On the plus side, with their hefty weight they serve a second life as great book-ends.
EDIT - A techie friend of mine wrote a little script to touch the HDD every 2 minutes to keep it active which worked fine, except that the drives now got so hot that the fan went to high constantly and sounded like a jet engine.
Like I said, a dog of a drive.
It does exactly what you describe - spins the drives down to 'save' power and then when your computer needs access, they take so long to spin back up that the computer often decides they have been lost and unmounts them.
I did a lot of searching back when I first got them and found a Western Digital support doc saying that it was the way the unit was built and that there was no way to change the sleep settings.
On the plus side, with their hefty weight they serve a second life as great book-ends.
EDIT - A techie friend of mine wrote a little script to touch the HDD every 2 minutes to keep it active which worked fine, except that the drives now got so hot that the fan went to high constantly and sounded like a jet engine.
Like I said, a dog of a drive.