External enclosure

kojak71 · Post by **kojak71** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:08 pm

I've been toying with what sort of external hard-drive or enclosure to buy. One of the things that is missing from any spec. sheet I've examined, is whether or not they allow the drives to idle/spin-down after a set period of time. The drive(s) will be connected to my MCE HTPC which runs 24/7.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:29 pm

Get an eSATA enclosure and a SATA to eSATA PCI bracket. This way the HD acts as if it is a normal internal HD and you can spin it down the same way you do your internal drives.

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:57 pm

Tibors wrote:Get an eSATA enclosure and a SATA to eSATA PCI bracket. This way the HD acts as if it is a normal internal HD and you can spin it down the same way you do your internal drives.

This is a good suggestion. The USB external drives I've used so far don't seem to have that capability.

acaurora · Post by **acaurora** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 6:54 pm

some do, some don't.

I myself have four external HDDs. The one I like most is not even on the manufacturer's website - it is that new. The Western Digital MyBook Platinum Edition - uses a 250 GB HDD, USB/Firewire interface. Yes, eSATA will be definately loads faster, though. I myself haven't tried it. What makes the Platinum Edition so likeable is that it has two rings - one shows power status, another is made out of 6 LEDs. Each LED lights up as another 1/6 of the total capacity gets used up - think of it as a % used meter. and yes it does auto power down after inactivity for about 15 minutes.

kojak71 · Post by **kojak71** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:11 am

Tibors wrote:Get an eSATA enclosure and a SATA to eSATA PCI bracket. This way the HD acts as if it is a normal internal HD and you can spin it down the same way you do your internal drives.

eSATA would be the ideal solution, however the only problem is that I won't be accessing that particular drive(s) all the time, whereas the other drives are used 24/7 (more or less). My understanding is that Windows cannot apply it's hard-drive power-management to an individual drive in a system (i.e. you wake up one hard-drive, and you wake them all).

coldmist · Post by **coldmist** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 9:32 am

No, windows can power down just a single drive. But if there is just a single byte requested from the drive, it either keeps spinning, or spins back up. So, don't put a swap file on it.