I have two external drives attached to my file server. The PC runs XP64. Both drives work perfectly well as HDs. Windows is set to Always On. .NET 4.0 is installed.
N: EasyStore 4TB. Cannot get any of the utils that came with it to install or run (same for ALL downloads from WDC site) so naturally they don’t work. (Even tried manually unpacking 'em, no joy.)
O: MyBook 6TB. The config and backup utils that came with it installed and work fine. Backup sees both drives. HOWEVER, the drive configuration tool can ONLY see the MyBook.
I want to set the EasyStore to NeverSleep. How can I achieve this, when the WD utility that will install can’t see it??
I’ve rooted through the Registry hoping to find a key to copy, but didn’t find a sleep setting for the MyBook, so presume it’s set in the drive firmware rather than by Windows. However I’m comfortable editing the Registry, if there’s a setting I can change that would work.
I could do something ugly like ping the drive every few minutes to keep it awake, but that’s not really a quality solution.
I believed WD security, Utilities and Discovery not support for Windows XP. WD website states Vista and up only. You might have to install the software on another computer with Vista or higher or Mac OSX 10.8+ to able to set the sleep to never.
I tried a version of the installer that was even older than the version that came with the MyBook (which installed and works just fine on XP64, and the MyBook is newer than the EasyStore). It would not install, and when I manually unpacked it, would not run.
I have a suspicion the older version (1.0.x) is seeing 64bit and falling over, and by some weird luck the MyBook-only version (1.3.x, IIRC) happens to support both XP and 64bit. But it still doesn’t see the EasyStore.
I’d thought about temporarily moving it to one of the newer boxen and seeing if the software would work or the setting would stick across systems, but that doesn’t really solve the problem.
just like your other temporary solution, just write batch file run in your startup folder. write/delete a file every 30 minutes. I think that after 30 or 90 minutes the drive will go to sleep.
It sleeps after 15 minutes. Ping is doable but I don’t want to do a tempfile-write solution because I write to the drive often enough that the effect would be a lot more fragmentation, and defragging 4TB is kinda not practical.
So the solution I came up with to keep the drive awake is have WinAmp run 24/7 (with the volume turned off), using a looping playlist of several random MP3 files, so the drive gets pinged every 3 to 5 minutes. This is ugly, and tends to heat up the southbridge chip, but at least it works better than WD’s software, which doesn’t work at all on that drive. (Why that software even needs to be drive or OS specific escapes me. It should see “WD HD” and Just Work.)
