My Passport Ultra 1TB spins constantly with D-Link Shareport Plus in use

[Joe_Admire]

I bought a My Passport Ultra 1TB yesterday to use as a cloud drive with my new D-Link DIR-866L router. Since the built-in Shareport utility in the router’s firmware has little functionality, I downloaded Shareport Plus to use on my Windows 7 desktop (as well as installed the DLink Shareport apps on my iPhone and Galaxy A tablet). I used Shareport Plus’ “map network drive” utility to map the new drive to my system (the drive letter is Z:). I already own two My Book 3TB drives which are attached to my desktop as well, drive letters G: and H: (I have two internal hard drives, C: and D:, and two DVD writer drives, E: and F:).

The My Passport works fine with Shareport and I’ve transferred 100GB of files to it over the last day or so, and can access them with both my iPhone and tablet. The problem is that the drive doesn’t seem to want to go to sleep when not in use; the light is blinking constantly and I can feel the drive spinning. If anyone else is using Shareport/Shareport Plus with the My Passport Ultra, is this normal behavior? If not, what can I do to get the My Passport to go to sleep when not actually being accessed?

[mike27oct]

Be patient. I have a drive on my router, too. All was fine until I deleted a lot of older media and re-copied updated media on to it. Yep, it spun off and on for a few days. I wondered why. I know it keeps a database called minidlna on it that it updates when new stuff is added. I usually don’t delete a lot and then add a lot. I also could not remember if the drive came with the minidata database or not; maybe router created the folder. I thought maybe it is corrupted. One way to get answers, put drive on the PC.

The minidlna folder is hidden; cant be seen unless on my PC. Well, there is one way to see if router creates the minidlna folder. I can just delete it. NO, the best way to delete something you are not sure of is to RENAME it, that way if you screwed up and really need it, you just rename it back again. I did that, put the drive back on router and overnight it had stopped spinning. Looked at drive on PC in morning and there was a new minidlna folder. The older folder must have been corrupted, router made a new one, and drive is OK and going to sleep as before.

I am not suggesting you have a minidlna folder (you might; it’s public domain) or that it is corrupted, because you dumped a lot of data onto drive and drive needs to catalog it all. Give it a day or so, and if it sleeps, fine, if not take drive off router and look at it on PC. Go from there.

[Joe_Admire]

That makes sense. I do have the “show hidden files” option turned on on my PC, so I can see the minidlna item (which turns out to be just a text document, I was able to look at it in Notepad). It seems not to have updated since Saturday night, which is slightly odd since I added a lot of files yesterday, so I think you might be right that something got messed up with it. The irony about it causing all this uproar is that it’s just a record of events that occur while the drive is running, from what I saw when I looked at it. (It’s just a text file though, not a folder, so when I went back and reread your post again, I guess I do have to put it on my PC to look at the folder).

Anyway, I’ll go ahead and try what you suggested, just let it go on its way cataloging or whatever today and look at it again tomorrow, I haven’t owned an external USB drive this big before - my previous My Passports were 500GB’s used with my laptop; in fact, I bought another Ultra 1TB yesterday to replace those two and am planning to transfer the data this week, so I suppose I might see that behavior with this one as well.

[mike27oct]

Got it. the minidlna folder contains database files; don’t be concerned of the contents, be concerned that it is not corrupted. If so, you can fix it as I described above if necessary. How is the drive doing today; did it finally sleep?

[Joe_Admire]

Not yet, I just got home from work and it’s still spinning. The “files” database item, which of course is a listing of all the files on the drives, appears to have updated, however, this afternoon. I’m going to try tonight or tomorrow to disconnect the drive from the router, plug it into one of the PC’s USB ports, rename the minidlna folder and then put it back on the router, as you suggested. We’ll see how that works. First, though, I have to create a MyDLink account - I was testing whether I could access the drive from a remote location, couldn’t do it, looked up a couple of things and realized I’d neglected to set up the account I need to log in.

[mike27oct]

OK, go for it. Hopefully this idea will work for you as it did for me.

[Joe_Admire]

Right, I just put the My Passport on my desktop and renamed the mydlna file to mydlna-old. Let’s see what happens next…

Put it back on the router, fired up SharePort Plus and re-assigned a drive letter to get it visible in Windows Explorer. There’s a new minidlna file there, as expected. The drive light is blinking rapidly/drive is spinning, so let’s see what happens - I believe you said earlier you had to wait a while for it to stop spinning.

[mike27oct]

Yes. I put drive back on router at bedtime, checked it when I got up, and it had stopped spinning. The 1TB drive has a little over 500GB of my data on it on it.

OK, and be sure router is off when you reattach it to router. My Asus router needs to spin up drive when it comes on or it doesn’t read it.

[Joe_Admire]

I didn’t know that last bit (about the router having to be off when I reattached the drive). It didn’t seem to make a difference on my D-Link router, though, because it’s reading the drive’s contents fine, at least on the home network, as I verified by experimenting with my tablet and iPhone. Oh well, I’ll try again tomorrow evening. TBH, I was a bit more concerned with getting MyDLink to work so that I can access the drive remotely - I think I got everything there set up correctly, but I’ll have to try it tomorrow to make sure it actually works.

[mike27oct]

I advise having router off when removing AND attaching drive, be sure drive is idle when turning off router. Just let it go; I don’t advice shutting it down while drive is doing its thing.

[Joe_Admire]

Agreed, for this particular router the proper action to do is to go to the drive in My Computer in Windows Explorer and select “Disconnect”, then wait for the drive to spin down before turning off the router and removing it.

[Joe_Admire]

I just checked the drive again - it’s still spinning, but here’s somethinv very interesting that may confirm what you said earlier about the minidlna file having been corrupted the first time around. Before I disconnected and reattached the My Passport 1TB about 7 hours ago, the “files” database file was only about 18MB. Now, having left it to run for the night, that file is over 592mb in size (there’s about 98GB worth of data on the drive right now). I conjecture that indexing wasn’t working properly the first time around, and now that I’ve renamed the old minidlna folder, it now is. (The new minidlna file is now 361kb, increasing as the drive continues to index the files on it and report various events. It looks as if there were a number of problems copying over files Saturday night and I’ll have to go back and re-do some copy operations…

(A couple of hours later…) At this rate the “files” database is probably going to end up being at least 3-4GB for 500GB of data on the drive. Good that I only put 100GB on to begin with. Anyway, indexing should finish sometime today and we’ll see if the drive spins down then.

[Joe_Admire]

Update: I think I might have a problem. The drive continued spinning all day even after it should have finished indexing, and the “files” database file has grown to over 700MB. I think it has something to do with that I mapped it as a network drive (Z:) from SharePort Plus, so I disconnected the drive and then re-opened it directly from SharePort Plus. It opened OK, but it’s still spinning. I have no idea what will make it stop at this point, and bearing in mind what you said earlier, I don’t want to risk turning off the router while the drive is still active. What should I do?

EDIT: This doesn’t, in fact, seem to be a problem unique to the DIR-866L. A Bing search just now turned up at least two or three other reports of users complaining about their USB hard drives not spinning down/going into sleep mode when connected to routers, even when nobody was accessing them. The bad news is that so far I haven’t been able to find a solution; in fact, some people commented that since routers are also designed to connect to NAS drives, it was in fact undesirable for some reason (which I couldn’t deduce) to include a facility to put the drive into sleep mode, and others commented that that (sending drives into sleep mode) was properly a function of the OS rather than of the router.

FURTHER EDIT: Something actually did change just a few minutes ago. I was in the middle of writing a post to the D-Link forum to see if anyone there could help from the router side, when I looked down at the My Passport and noticed that the drive light is no longer blinking rapidly - instead, it’s shining steadily. I checked the user manual and that apparently means it’s FINALLY gone into idle state, though I can still feel it humming when I touch it. Dare I hope that the problem is finally solved? (P.S. The “files” database file is now 851MB. Yikes! I hate to think how big it’ll get if I put, say, 500GB worth of data on it.)

(HOPEFULLY FINAL) EDIT 2/24 6:35 pm EDT: The problem may finally be resolved. The drive went into “system standby” mode early this morning at last (drive light blinking on and off slowly), and I was able to access it remotely from my iPhone via Shareport today. Just arrived home and the drive is on standby mode, as it should be.

[mike27oct]

Some how, I never saw your last few posts here, but today I see them. Quite an experience for you. Appears it’s all where you want it to be, and let’s hope it stays that way for you.