Re: External Hard Drive wont shut off

Thanks Bill,
The enclosure is USB/E-Sata and came with a SATA cable to connect
directly to the motherboard.
The computer i set this backup on didnt have SATA connections.
I chose the enclosure so i could use a SATA hard drive and not for the
E-Sata connectivity (which reportedly is somewhat buggy)
The person who i did this for also wanted the capability of using this
with his laptop on occasion and needed to have the USB connectivity.
Im really surprised that aside from some of the prepackaged external
hard drives, that the auto spindown feature can not be made to work
via the drivers or firmware on these external enclosures.
I wanted a DIY solution to take advantage of Seagates 5 year warranty
on their hard drives and now i think it may have been the wrong
decision if it has to stay running all the time.
The 2 prepackaged external HD's i looked at from Seagate and Western
Digital both only came with 1 year warranties.
The enclosure in question does have a On/Off rocker switch, but my
friend already said he wont bother to turn it on and off.
The imaging software hes using has the ability to issue pre and post
scripts. Im looking into something where i can issue a post command to
maybe disable the external HD, but i suspect with power still applied
the HD is still going to spin. Ive also know there are some serial
(maybe USB) relay devices that i could disconnect power to the
external enclosure, but now we are talking overkill and making the
whole thing more complicated than it should be.


On Jan 29, 3:52 am, Bill Todd <billt...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
LOTL wrote:...

Any ideas or alternative enclosures are appreciated.One obvious solution would be to use an external SATA (not USB -> SATA)
enclosure; you could even cobble up an external PATA enclosure if you
cut a slot to pass the cables through (this is not strictly kosher, nor
are PATA cables longer than 18", but both have worked OK for me).

Another option would be to buy an inexpensive (as little as $7 for a
PATA version at geeks.com, though for a single item shipping would
double that and the SATA versions seem to be more expensive for no
obvious reason) 3.5" disk tray and carrier and mount them in an
available 5.25" bay to create a removable internal installation.

It sounds as if the disk spin-down facilities don't support disks that
aren't directly connected (rather than via USB) - though I'd kind of
expect XP to extend them to SCSI drives, and that might include drives
connected through an add-on PCI card (which since that's how common
add-on ATA cards present themselves to the system might work for them as
well).

- bill

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