WD MyBook Studio II 2 TB power saving sleep causes data loss

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I have just bought a WD MyBook Studio II 2 TB in order to make regular automated backups of my files on it every day.

My system is Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and the WD drive connected with eSATA in Raid 1 mode.

My main aim was  to minimize the risk of data loss buying this external HDD

After the installation of the WD external drive I had to face a very strange and dangerous phenomena. The drive goes to sleep after 10 min idle time. When the computer turns to the drive while it is sleeping, the drives starts to spin up one after the other and it takes at least 10 seconds. I do not know what happens in meanwhile but the data on the backup drive becomes corrupted and partly inaccessible. It happened all the time and sometimes some of the folders disappeared. I tried the change different setting in the OS without success. It was frightening because preventing data loss was the only reason buying this HDD.

It turned out for me that the guilty is the power saving “sleeping” function of the HDD. If the drive was awake, when I wanted to use a file, or the backup started to run there was no problem at all. But awakening the sleeping drive always caused data loss. Fortunately all data could be fully recovered by CHKDSK.

Searching the internet I learnt that this power saving function can not be switched off. Looking for solution I found a small app called HDDCoffee which does nothing else just keeping the drive awake and spinning. After installing it all the problems have gone.

But I  know it is a dirty solution and I would appreciate any advise to solve this problem in an elegant way

Thank you very much in advance!

2

Hi, what type of connection are you using to connect the my book to your computer? Have you tried connecting the hard drive to another computer to see if the same problem happens?

3

I use eSata connection. Since the drive can be managed only via USB, I tried that also and got the same symptom. My computer don’t have firewire so that was not tested.

The drive is at my workplace and there is no other eSata capable computer in the surrounding. I’m going to try then the USB on other computer.

The interesting is that my brother (who lives in another city so I can not test it on his setup) uses exactly (?) the same drive but a 2 years old one. It is on eSata and  hasn’t got power saving sleeping feature. It is awake until the computer is on. I can imagine that only the firmware in the newer products includes the power saving function. If that true, then theoretically using the old firmware could switch the sleeping thing off.