I was wondering whether anyone knows if its possible for the WDTV Live Hubs HDD to spin down after a period of idle time? Im looking to set it up as a NAS sort of device for someone which they will access the network share on it from several PCs and systems which means that the hub will need to be fully ON all the time for the share to be available if im right, but ths means the disk is always spun up, can it be set to spin down after an idle time? or is the only way to put the hub into standby?
The Hub will show up on your network regardless of whether it is off or on so long as it remains connected and not turned off by the front panel switch. The internal hard drive (including any connected via USB) will be available to other computers/devices on the network.
The Problem is: Even when the hub is in standby, the HDD keeps spinning. This means: the HDD spins all day and night long. I would very much appreciate a possibility to make the HDD spin down in standby mode.
I believe the hub uses a WD Scorpio Blue portable drive. It’s low power, quiet, and meant to be run 24/7. If you are hearing something it’s possibly the fan, not the drive.
There is obviously something the hub needs on that drive as I also have an external 2TB WD elements on the USB port and it spins down. Although agreed that a spin down would be nice, the fan may still need to be kept on to cool the main board.
When the first bought the hub, I did power it down every time it was used. In the end it wasn’t worth the effort so I left it in standby. The NAS feature is a plus anyway.
FuryDE wrote:
The Problem is: Even when the hub is in standby, the HDD keeps spinning. This means: the HDD spins all day and night long. I would very much appreciate a possibility to make the HDD spin down in standby mode.
Press the remote off button for 5 seconds and the internal disk will spin down.
Hard Drives have their own built in I/O control and on most PC Operating Systems, when Idle, the drive spins down after a couple of hours of inactivity unless the Operating system tells it not to. What you are hearing is the fan, and you have no way of knowing if your hard drive is in standby or not. You will have to look at power consumption charts, you can google for it, I believe it consumes about 8 watts of power in StandBy. They don’t tell you how long the unit was in Standby. So it’s possible that for the first 2 hours the unit consumes 8 watts so its possible that after some time there is only Network Activity and when the Network senses a file transfer is to take place, the Hard Drive will spin up again. I believe this is probably the most common sense way to go but in this world, often we don’t see common sense in a place we would expect it to be. We do not know details of WDTV low power state which WD should make available to us.
