I recently upgraded the drive that I have connected to my WDLive unit, running the latest firmware revision. The previous drive was a 1TB Fantom Green drive which worked really well but was long in the tooth. The new unit is a Rosewill RX-358 external enclosure with a WD AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB Green drive. The enclosure has an external power adapter powering the drive.
The issue I am having is that the WDLive seems to lose connection to the drive after a period of time. It almost seems like the drive is going to sleep or spinning down, and the WDLive can’t reconnect to it when it spins back up. When this happens, the unit reports that the drive storage is no longer available. It comes back up when I power down the drive, power it back up, and tell the WDLive to use the newly found local storage.
Any idea if this is an issue with the drive I selected or with the enclosure? Or something else all together?
If it’s USB3 it might be related to this bug. However, my desktop Green shuts down after 5 mins of activity, no matter what setting I enter with WD’s tool. Maybe it’s something similar with yours.
I recently got a WD external drive that spins down after a period of time without use. However, it works fine with the SMP. As soon as you try to access any info or file, the drive spins back up. All you notice is a couple seconds delay in responding. This is the way drives that spin themselves down should work.
I note that this is a USB2 drive (which I bought specifically to avoid any possible USB3 issues).
Thanks for the response. The Rosewill enclosure claims to be USB 2.0 though. I will try the front port just in case but it would appear to be a different problem.
A quick web search finds lots of hits from people claiming sleep/spindown problems from WD drives. WD has made available software to change some drive’s sleep settings, but you will have to look into whether they work for your drive. For example, my quick search found this page: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=305&sid=154&lang=en
ncarver wrote:
I recently got a WD external drive that spins down after a period of time without use. However, it works fine with the SMP. As soon as you try to access any info or file, the drive spins back up. All you notice is a couple seconds delay in responding. This is the way drives that spin themselves down should work.
I note that this is a USB2 drive (which I bought specifically to avoid any possible USB3 issues).
I have both USB 2 and USB 3 drives from three different manufactures that spni down and easily wake up when “poked” by a PC or program. No problem. It’s my understanding that GREEN drives go into a deep sleep mode, and they are mostly the problems. See this link: Seagate Agrees with Scottie about Green Hard … - Scottie’s
