Hacking USB Drives going to sleep

[WiiBlaster]

I own Seagate FreeAgent drives and I use the software that came with it to disable the sleep feature... hopefully that will help some people with these same drives...

I have this same HD Seagate Freeagent, mine is the 250GB, i've played games well over a hour and experienced no problems with any of my games, If i did have the problem when should i notice it or how long does it take to experience the problem

 

[rabapab23]

I own a WD MyBook 1TB external and I've been experiencing random freezes, and I was guessing it was that sleep feature. Hopefully something can be done about this....

 

[WiiBlaster]

I had this problem with my Maxtor Basics 500GB drive. By default it would go into sleep mode after 15 minutes. So if i decided to pause for 15+ minutes it would just freeze at the next loading part in game.

I was able to fix this using a tool called "Maxtor Manager" which can be found here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000f5ee0a0aRCRD

I know it says it's for OneTouch blabla, but it worked fine with my Maxtor Basics drive anyway. Just change sleep to "Never" i settings.
Most drives out there probably have some similar tools, just look it up.

First off i want to say Thanks

Second i didn't even know i had this problem until i read your post, What i done to test it was right before i finished a race in Mario Kart, I paused the game left it for about 15 min, then unpaused and finished the race, has soon as i finished the race the game would lock up,
I have a Seagate free agent Go 250GB HD, Used the program you posted, change the setting to Never on power management
and it Fixed the problem

it was originally set for 5min before it went into sleep mode.lol

 

[BIG MOE]

I had this problem with my Maxtor Basics 500GB drive. By default it would go into sleep mode after 15 minutes. So if i decided to pause for 15+ minutes it would just freeze at the next loading part in game.

I was able to fix this using a tool called "Maxtor Manager" which can be found here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000f5ee0a0aRCRD

I know it says it's for OneTouch blabla, but it worked fine with my Maxtor Basics drive anyway. Just change sleep to "Never" i settings.
Most drives out there probably have some similar tools, just look it up.

First off i want to say Thanks

Second i didn't even know i had this problem until i read your post, What i done to test it was right before i finished a race in Mario Kart, I paused the game left it for about 15 min, then unpaused and finished the race, has soon as i finished the race the game would lock up,
I have a Seagate free agent Go 250GB HD, Used the program you posted, change the setting to Never on power management
and it Fixed the problem

it was originally set for 5min before it went into sleep mode.lol

WiiBlaster you are correct

and i'll add another thanks from me too , cause I thought it's my Seagate 1TB issue of support totally forgetting that all my other drives are set to never as far as Sleep in power manager , and this goes to all HDD it should have a device Manager from the manufacturer Support site

thanks again

 

[SpaceJump]

Will a 1,5TB Seagate ST31500341AS work with this tool?

 

[manias]

a better solution would be a proper reinitialization of the hard drive. sleep mode is not meaningless.

I agree, would be nice.. And perhaps some clever guy on this forum can implement it since we have the source.. (tho I'm useless at that front, sorry

)
or at least that it writes some silly byte of data to the disk every 5 mins?

Anyhoo hope Waninkoko also figures this out! Seems pretty proven to me..

 

[pelago]

Wouldn't periodically reading from the drive work too, and would be safer than writing? Or would that just read from cache and not actually cause the drive to wake up?

 

[icebrg5]

Can this tool feature be used on the drive once its been formatted to wbfs? or will i have to reformat to fat32 and then use it?

I have a maxtor one touch mini 4 250gb.Just got it last night and played with it for a bit but it never sat for longer then a couple minutes without being used so i don't know if it has the sleep feature or not.

 

[dustloop]

YES! I used my Seagate Manager for my FreeAgent Go and turned it off going to sleep after 30 minutes, which is around the same time Zelda used to crash when loading areas. I have been playing now for 3 hours with no crash! Great thinking!

 

[Legah]

Does anyone know if there's a utility that works on Freecom 400GB (or Samsung as that's the actual drive inside)

 

[hdhacker]

I'm going to be receiving a Western Digital Passport Essentials today. I've heard it has the spindown problem, too. However, there's no utility from Western Digital to change the spindown feature.

I found a possible way to do it using the hdparm program. The hdparm program usually doesn't work with USB drives, but I did find some mention in the docs that some of the newer USB drives do accept the SATA commands. If it doesn't, I might be able to fix it by removing the internal drive from the enclosure and connecting it internally to a SATA port so I can run hdparm on it.

Here's a youtube video on how to open the Passport Essentials drive:



Please note that the latest hardware revision of the Passport Essentials drive cannot be disconnected from the USB adapter. I guess it's something to look for BEFORE you buy it in a store. See the video for more info.

EDIT: Fixed YouTube video

vvvvvvvvv Have you tried to see if hdparm works?

 

[wiiztec]

I had this problem with my Maxtor Basics 500GB drive. By default it would go into sleep mode after 15 minutes. So if i decided to pause for 15+ minutes it would just freeze at the next loading part in game.

I was able to fix this using a tool called "Maxtor Manager" which can be found here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000f5ee0a0aRCRD

I know it says it's for OneTouch blabla, but it worked fine with my Maxtor Basics drive anyway. Just change sleep to "Never" i settings.
Most drives out there probably have some similar tools, just look it up.

First off i want to say Thanks

Second i didn't even know i had this problem until i read your post, What i done to test it was right before i finished a race in Mario Kart, I paused the game left it for about 15 min, then unpaused and finished the race, has soon as i finished the race the game would lock up,
I have a Seagate free agent Go 250GB HD, Used the program you posted, change the setting to Never on power management
and it Fixed the problem

it was originally set for 5min before it went into sleep mode.lol

I tried that with my 400GB WD Passport and it froze for a bit while the sound looped and then it resumed and was fine

 

[blk133]

I had this problem with my Maxtor Basics 500GB drive. By default it would go into sleep mode after 15 minutes. So if i decided to pause for 15+ minutes it would just freeze at the next loading part in game.

I was able to fix this using a tool called "Maxtor Manager" which can be found here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000f5ee0a0aRCRD

I know it says it's for OneTouch blabla, but it worked fine with my Maxtor Basics drive anyway. Just change sleep to "Never" i settings.
Most drives out there probably have some similar tools, just look it up.

Thank you! I looked for this for a long time and couldn't find anything that would disable sleep mode of my Maxtor. Original software that was installed on the drive didn't work for some reason. Downloaded this one, installed, disabled sleep mode, happy camper!

Thanks again.

 

[manias]

Since I have a samsung drive (pleomax) which doesn't have software like this, anyone got any other ideas? Or even better, someone know how to program a timed ping of sorts in the usbloader to keep the hd's from sleeping?

 

[hdhacker]

Since I have a samsung drive (pleomax) which doesn't have software like this, anyone got any other ideas? Or even better, someone know how to program a timed ping of sorts in the usbloader to keep the hd's from sleeping?

Have you tried hdparm? It probably won't work with a USB drive, but you never know.

 

[manias]

Since I have a samsung drive (pleomax) which doesn't have software like this, anyone got any other ideas? Or even better, someone know how to program a timed ping of sorts in the usbloader to keep the hd's from sleeping?

Have you tried hdparm? It probably won't work with a USB drive, but you never know.

as u said, hdparm doesn't work on usb drives..

 

[Legah]

I tried hdparm too, not working with my usb connected freecom (samsung) drive

 

[manias]

how they fixed it in linux is using a timer and then it using the " touch " command to write an empty file every x minutes, works like a charm there. So hope someone can code that into the usb loader..

 

[hdhacker]

how they fixed it in linux is using a timer and then it using the " touch " command to write an empty file every x minutes, works like a charm there. So hope someone can code that into the usb loader..

That's not a fix, it's a work around.

Does the loader stay resident while the game runs? Wouldn't it be the responsibility of the IOS222 to keep the drive connection alive?

 

[manias]

how they fixed it in linux is using a timer and then it using the " touch " command to write an empty file every x minutes, works like a charm there. So hope someone can code that into the usb loader..

That's not a fix, it's a work around.

Does the loader stay resident while the game runs? Wouldn't it be the responsibility of the IOS222 to keep the drive connection alive?

well it would be a workaround that would work for all drives!

for me games crash when there hasn't been activity for a while, e.g. if you're in the same are for a while in broken sword, or in the intro @ brawl,... stuff like that
dunno if any IOS keeps the drive from downspinning, not really a problem in legal USB usage in the wii.. it's more a bug in the usbloader that it can't spin the drive back up without crashing.. So workaround is either the touch thing, OR finding a way of not crashing whilst upspinning?