Some long while ago, I bought a Buffalo USB 1Tb hard drive. It is physically quite large and came with its own wall-wart PSU. I have not really used it much. This week my ISP sent me a new router, which included a USB Samba connection and I have now managed too get the drive working via that.
If unused for a while, the hard drives in my PC power themselves down, so I rather expected there might be some way to achieve that with the Buffalo drive. It seems silly to have it running continuously if it is not being used, but where the router and Buffalo are located, is not easily accessed and some way away. Is there some way too set such a drive too self power down after a period of inactivity please?
They do? I could imagine that they might spin down (ie stop rotating) and therefore reduce their power consumption, but I'd expect their controllers to stay powered-up, so that they could initiate a spin-up when the next I/O request comes along.
I'd have thought the Buffalo drive would also spin down, but if it powers off how would you then get it back on again?
I've a router with some sort of NAS capabilty (which I've not explored). One of the problems with that, so far as I can see, is that if one plans to switch off an attached drive one first has to dismount it from the router's OS - which in practice means using a browser to login to the router, navigating to the disk-controller page, and choosing 'dismount'. It's not something I'd do very often...
You would need support for this in the router[1], since it is in effect acting as a NAS device - it needs to control the drive based on the demands of the network, not just one PC.
[1] Depending on what it is, it may have it, or even a capability to add facilities.
I've noticed that spin down effect on USB drives when they're unmounted. Slightly annoying for me is that this doesn't happen with e-SATA connected drives.
It's quite possible that the Buffalo USB drive is already set to spin down after a 10 or 15 minute timeout period (guaranteed to in fact if they've used a Seagate Special).
The spin down of the internal drives in the PC will be mediated by the power management features of the OS rather than the built in 1 to
15 minute programmable timeout that can be enabled in the HDD's own controller.
The power management will simply issue a "Standby_Immediate" AT command to the drive at timeout. Incidently the same AT command that an SSD aware OS is _supposed_ to issue just prior to switch off when shutting down.
The choice of using spin down power saving could be described as a case of: a "Damned if you do. Damned if you don't." choice. What's best depends on whether you value the electricity savings over the integrity of your data which rather depends on your usage pattern.
If you're likely to only be working the drive just once or twice a week for an hour or two's worth of intense activity each time, the spin down power saving benefit outweighs the risk of disk failure due to startup stresses and the effects of thermal cycling. In this case, I'd be inclined to set a longish timeout period of an hour or three.
If you're going to be making frequent accesses in relatively short bursts of activity throughout each working day, you'd be well advised to disable power saving spin down (if you can - you won't have any choice in the matter if the drive is a Seagate Special) or else set it to a 3 or 4 hours timeout period so that it's only effectively spun down once a day to give it an 'overnight rest'.
In essence, you're trying to avoid cycling the drive temperature up and down more than 3 or 4 times a day. If you've any doubts over this (and you value your data more than the 5 or 6 quid saving per drive on the annual electricity bill), imo, you'd best disable spin down altogether (discretion being the best part of valour in this case).
However, as I've mentioned twice already, you may have no choice in the matter.
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