Passport Sleeps, Elements Doesn't. What gives?

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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I have a 1.5 TB WD 15EADS Elements external USB drive, and a 320 GB External USB Passport ( 3200BMV). In a nutshell, the problem is with the Passport. It friggin sleeps. I don’t have any WD software installed because, well, it’s a portable drive and I move it from computer to computer. Every computer I put it on, if I leave it for a while (we’ll say a half hour), it goes to sleep.

The symptoms are that I can have explorer open, looking at the drive - go away for a half hour, come back click on a folder and Win XP Pro SP3 makes the “disconnect” sound, followed immediately by the “connect” sound. During this process, explorer moves to the next available drive since the Passport’s not there, then you see the familiar AutoScanning that pops up a dialog asking you what you want to do. Of course, I say view files and folders, and I’m back in business again.

But this behavior is as predictable as the sunrise. It does NOT happen with the 1.5 TB Elements drive that is also running. BTW, I love that Elements drive.

So I cannot believe that it’s something in XP that is mis-configured - it happens on all computers and it doesn’t happen with the elements drive. Write cache is disabled, fyi.

I have WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostics on one of the machines I connect the drive to. If the drive has been sitting for a half hour, the DLGDIAG won’t see the drive. There’s the “disconnect” sound followed by the “connect” sound, then it is see by DLGDIAG.

How can I stop this thing from going to sleep? I’m going nuts trying to figure this out.

Thanks in advance for any help.

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It’s probably the Green Technology mentioned in specs. It’s been posted about before http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Externals/WD-Elements-SE-2-5-quot-1Tb-Change-Spin-down-Time/m-p/70350#M1029   look for the part about CrystalDisk. Then there is this post http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-for-PC/My-Book-Home-1TB-connected-by-eSata-disappears-after-going-to/td-p/21144/page/4 .

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Thanks for the link. It appears that the Crystal Disk Info utility has to be running resident on the PC in question in order to keep the Passport from sleeping. That kinda defeats my purpose, but it’s good to know that there’s nothing I can really do about it. It’s just annoying.