Why won't my external drives shut down automatically?

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A lot of external drives have external power supplies and don't take power cues from your PC, just from their internal controllers. That's why Leo's drive shuts off on its own and yours don't. Yours are just made to spin up when you flip the power switch and turn off when you flip it again.

I have an Acom that is just like yours... if it's on, it's on. Same with one I had that was an external housing you can slap any hard drive into (nice for migrating from an old computer to a new one - just slap the old PCs hard drive into an external case and hook it up to the new PC).

If you want a drive that shuts down after X minutes of inactivity, you'll need to closely examine the specs... or get the same Maxtors Leo has. Too bad he didn't mention the model.

Actually I have Maxtors in the external case.
They are Maxtor 200 Gig Lo1P200 drives.

I would like to know what the period of inactivity is before they spin down or turn off.

What information that has been give so far has been useful.
Thanks guys.
Dominick

Actually I have Maxtors in the external case.
They are Maxtor 200 Gig Lo1P200 drives.

I would like to know what the period of inactivity is before they spin down or turn off.

What information that has been give so far has been useful.
Thanks guys.
Dominick

I made a mistake on the model #-Hey, it was 4am and I was still half asleep.

The # I gave was the new drives I installed.
The two old drives were 80GIG and I installed those in the external HDD Firewire Case. The # for them is 6YO80L.

On the Maxtor site it states that these drives can be put to sleep by sending them ATA commands to configure them.

I have nom idea of how to do that so if anyone knows please let me know.

Thanks

I have three "OneTouch" drives from Maxtor - so they're self contained, with external powersupply and USB/Firewire interface. I can't say that I've paid attention to how long it takes for them to spin down, but I would guess 10 or 15 minutes of inactivity or so.

Well, I also had a one touch external and it never shut off. It was a USB.

It took a dump on me not long ago so I don't use it anymore.

For Maxtor external 1394/USB2 drives, the newer one-touch configuration software that you can download from the maxtor website has the ability to customise the timeout period before the disks will turn off. The choices range from 1 minute to never. The default is 15 minutes for my OneTouch if I remember correctly.

I've now purchased a Seagate 400GB external 1394/USB2 drive, and it has a time of 5 minutes, after which it will power down if there is no disk activity. Unfortunately Seagate don't have a utility which is able to customise this, and the Maxtor utility only works for Maxtor drives.

I find that 5 minutes is way too short, and while actually using the computer, the drive will constantly wake-up then go back to sleep. Simply double-clicking the my computer icon wakes it up, simply composing email for 5 minutes puts it to sleep. Because this constant spin-up and spin-down can't be good for the drive, and because it annoys me too, and there was no way to adjust this time peiod, I had to come up with a solution. I wrote a visual basic script which simply writes to a file (on the drive) every 4 minutes, which is enough to keep it running continuously.

The script is attached below, and you can use Microsoft's InstSrv.exe and Srvany.exe to make this script run as a system service.

Script:

'***********************************************************
' The purpose of this script is to keep external hard
' drives awake which would otherwise turn off after their
' 5 minute timers detect no disk activity.
' To use, simply place this script on the hard disk
' you want to keep awake, e.g. in a sub folder.
' Double-Click to run the script, there is no GUI.
' A file will appear that has the same name as the script
' with the extension "-timestamp.txt" appended.
' This script writes to this text file every 4 minutes
' Simply create a shortcut to this script in your
' startup folder so that it runs everytime your PC boots.
' Advanced technically minded users have proven good
' results can be achieved with SrvAny.exe and InstSrv.exe
' from the Microsoft Resource Kit, to create this as
' a service.
' This script is in the Public Domain 2006
'***********************************************************

Const ForWriting = 2
Dim fso, f
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Function WriteToFile
Set f = fso.OpenTextFile( Wscript.ScriptFullName & "-timestamp.txt", ForWriting, True)
f.Write Now
f.Close
End Function

Do
WriteToFile
Wscript.Sleep (240000)
Loop

To install as a service, use instsrv.exe (from the Windows Resource Kit Tools for Windows Server 2003) as follows:

instsrv TimeStamperScript "c:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\srvany.exe"

Then add the these registry keys:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TimeStamperScript\Parameters]
"Application"="c:\\windows\\system32\\wscript.exe"
"AppParameters"="s:\\TimeStamper\\TimeStamperScript.vbs"

As you can see, the script itself is on the external drive, in this case in the TimeStamper directory.

There is something wrong with my computer. It was working fine, then every time i turn it on, it wont start up. I have to take off the power from the back and put it back on for it to turn on. What is wrong with my computer

My computer keeps shutting down automatically, when I'm playing computer games and if I walk away for more than 10 minutes.

What's wrong?

I have a Windows XP professional, with comcast.

Help!

:) Paulette

Kinda sounds like standby. I'd look in power options and see if that's enabled.

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