I posted this in the ‘WDTV Media Player’ forum, but then I realized my model was the WDTV Live Streaming’ model, so I’m posting it here also. I’ll try to close out the other thread …
I’ve noticed that, even when the WDTV-Live box goes to sleep (front light goes out), the external USB drive light stays on and keeps spinning - for days.
I’ve got the device set to sleep (3 hours energy saving auto shut down is on),
Further - if I ‘eject’ the USB drive, the eject action completes without error, but still the light stays on and the drive keeps spinning. I just went to ‘setup / Disk Manager’, and it says ‘No USB storage currently connected to the WD TV’.
I don’t mind just yanking the USB drive to stop it from spinning, but it seems like, after doing this, next time I plug it into my windows PC, it tells me I need to scan for errors/ etc. I found another similar post from a couple of years ago but it was closed, and no resolution.
You are suggesting I fully power down the WDTV Live unit. Well that will, of course, turn off the USB drive. But what I’m looking for is a way to leave the USB drive physically plugged in, and the WDTV Live unit powered up but in ‘sleep’ mode, so I can ‘wake’ it using the remote, and then have access to my media library.
Here’s my usage scenario. I use the WDTV Live unit almost exclusively as a means to play my media library, which is stored on the USB drive. I watch movies maybe once a week. I expect the unit to go to sleep by itself after a few hours of inactivity (and it does), and I expect the USB drive to also sleep in a similar fashion. But what I’m noticing is, the USB drive continues to spin for days and days. I’m willing to take manual steps if necessary to force the USB to sleep (such as ‘ejecting’ it).
I guess the time difference between waking from sleep and waking from ‘off’ is not that great, so I could just power the unit down but that’s certainly not how I would expect it to work. I mean … what is the point of the ‘eject’ function on the device?
The point of the Eject function is to be able to safely unplug the USB drive without corruption without first powering down the WD TV Live SMP completely.
I have a 2TB WD Passport USB drive plugged into my WD TV Live SMP which I leave in standy mode, not fully powered down.
The drive spins down after a few minutes of not being in use, but does not go completely off - the drive LED blinks slowly on and off. But this is a capability of the drive, not the WD TV Live SMP. This behavior is “settable” via the software that came with the drive.
I can reach the USB drive over the network without powering on the WD TV Live SMP, but there are a few seconds of delay while the drive spins up. The drive will spindown by itself after a few minutes of disuse.
What brand of USB drive do you have? Does it have a programmable spindown mode or does it rely on the device that is connected to to do that?
But what I’m looking for is a way to leave the USB drive physically plugged in, and the WDTV Live unit powered up but in ‘sleep’ mode, so I can ‘wake’ it using the remote, and then have access to my media library.
Consider changing your external hard drive. I use a combinbation of Toshiba, WD and Seagate USB externals in varying sizes, and all spin down when the SMP is in standby. That way my library is available from any device via the SMP after a moment of spin-up time.
A thought: are you you using the front or rear port on the SMP? I remembered I have one Toshiba that will not spin down if it’s on the rear USB port. On the front it works fine.
My drive is a Seagate “Backup Plus Portable Drive”, 1.5TB, Model SRD0SP0.
Interestingly, the unit never spins down. Now that you mention it, I’ve seen other USB drives that go to sleep, where the light on the device slowly blinks on/off. And it’s the same when plugged in to my windows boxes also - stays on all the time (and feels warm). So it may be that I have a drive issue.
it suggests I can change the sleep time, but - I get the impression that this is specific to the host it is plugged into, not the drive itself (based on what it says about Macs in that article). I’m reluctant to install the seagate software just for this …
After doing a complete power-down (press-hold power button on remote, as advised here), I unplugged the drive, and plugged into my windows 7 box. I immediately got a pop up informing me the drive had issues and I should scan. I foolishly chose the optional ‘scan and fix’ options, and it took 2 days (!) to tell me there were no problems. This is one of the main reasons to try to get to the bottom of this - I want to know how to ‘cleanly’ shut down the drive on WDTV Live so it does not throw errors when plugging into windows box. The other reason is, I don’t want the drive to stay spinning for days and days for no reason (sice it’s exposed and can be bumped, etc).
As I said, I have a 2TB WD Passport USB drive and the sleep setting is settable via the software that came with the drive.
I can’t speak to Seagate things, but this is how WD drives work:
The software must be installed on a Windows machine, and with the WD Passport plugged into the same machine, the sleep time can be set. This stores that value on the drive.
Once set, it doesn’t matter where the WD Passport drive is moved to later. The as set sleep time follows the drive because the setting is stored in the drive itself.
As for the time it takes to scan the drive and fix errors, a quick check can be done which will complete in a few minutes, or a more thourough full sector by sector scan can be performed that can take a very long time.
As for safely removing the drive, you have two choices. Use the Eject function, or fully power down the WD TV Live. The Eject function will not power down the drive or stop it spinning and it will not power down the WD TV Live. Only fully powering down the WD TV Live will do that.
Consider changing your external hard drive. I use a combinbation of Toshiba, WD and Seagate USB externals in varying sizes, and all spin down when the SMP is in standby. That way my library is available from any device via the SMP after a moment of spin-up time.
A thought: are you you using the front or rear port on the SMP? I remembered I have one Toshiba that will not spin down if it’s on the rear USB port. On the front it works fine.
Interesting - I have two WDTV live devices, and I know one of them has issues with the rear port.
I just plugged my device into the front port as a test. Should I expect the drive to spin down only when the WDTVLive unit goes into standby, and thus - if I short-press power, should I expect the drive to spin down then?
Good news (mostly) / bad news! I downloaded/installed the Seagate Dashboard program, and set the power down timer to 5 mins. I then tested in on windows (by ingoring it for 5 mins) and sure enough, it spun down. I then plugged it into my WDTV live device, and observed the same behaviour - spun down. That’s the good news. Obviously the setting is stored on the drive (that’s totally intuitive, but then, I wonder why Seagate say this will only work on windows …?).
Oddly, the light on the drive is unpredictable. In some instances, the light went out altogether (totally off); at other times, the light stayed on fully (no dimming, no pulsing) but the drive was most definitely not spinning. Haven’t discerned a pattern to this yet (may not matter).
The bad news is … on my second test with the WDTV unit, I simply left everything alone for 20 mins (first test, I ‘slept’ the WDTV unit, and the USB drive spun down shortly after). The drive was spun down (good!) but the WDTV unit was locked up. TV screen was frozen on the ‘home’ screen with a clock display that was clearly in the past (not sure if it corresponded to the drive spin down, but it could have been). Nothing would rescue the WDTV other than unplugging. A repeat of this test, after restarting the unit, worked just fine.
Anyway - thanks for everyone’s assistance. I’ve always assumed USB drives were set to spin down ‘out of the box’ so this is a good lesson.
