Hacking USB Drives going to sleep

wiiNinja · Apr 4, 2009

I had this problem last year when I used an external Seagate USB drive to run Debian Linux:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/4...orkaround-linux

The workaround for me was to use a utility called "sdparm" to disable this "sleeping" feature.
I wonder if this is one of the causes for users of USB Loader seeing games freezing at times.
I currently use a Western Digital 160GB USB drive and it doesn't seem to have this problem.

manias · Apr 4, 2009

wiiNinja said:
I had this problem last year when I used an external Seagate USB drive to run Debian Linux:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/4...orkaround-linux

The workaround for me was to use a utility called "sdparm" to disable this "sleeping" feature.
I wonder if this is one of the causes for users of USB Loader seeing games freezing at times.
I currently use a Western Digital 160GB USB drive and it doesn't seem to have this problem.

I was wondering if anyone had freezes after some time on usb sticks?

Cjuub · Apr 4, 2009

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.

twig123 · Apr 4, 2009

I'm experiencing lockups/freezing when using my Western Digital 80GB in an External Enclosure... I downloaded the above "Maxtor Manager" just for giggles, hoping it could look at the settings on my drive... but it doesn't see my drive (not that I really expected it to). Anybody else having the same issue with lockups on WD drives, and possibly have a solution?

Red_Dragon · Apr 4, 2009

CUBEpro said:
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

Ahh thanks for that link dude, i've got the same HD as you and found out earlier today the sleeping problem.

Much appreciated.

Cjuub · Apr 4, 2009

twig123 said:
I'm experiencing lockups/freezing when using my Western Digital 80GB in an External Enclosure... I downloaded the above "Maxtor Manager" just for giggles, hoping it could look at the settings on my drive... but it doesn't see my drive (not that I really expected it to). Anybody else having the same issue with lockups on WD drives, and possibly have a solution?

Maxtor Manager is probably only for maxtor/seagate drives. Wouldn't recommend it for other drives.

I had to format my drive to NTFS to get Maxtor Manager to recognize it. But atleast I got the sleep mode problem fixed!
Red_Dragon: Glad to help!

100th post! Took a while heh.

knuttan · Apr 4, 2009

I use a WD My Book 1TB Essential, and have been experiencing freezing in de Blob and Secret Files: Tunguska.

I've been looking into this issue for some time, and it's not looking good. The sleep function of the My Book series is apparently built into the hardware of the enclosure. No tool to can disable this, sadly. I've tried with sdparm, but the disk is not configurable because of the casing..

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.os.linu...1450297f7?pli=1
(Look in the quoted text in the bottom post)

I'm going to remove the drive from the WD enclosure, and insert it into another one. Not sure what to buy yet, but I'll post my results once I find one.

Dodi · Apr 4, 2009

CUBEpro said:
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.

Thanks for the link!
I have the same drive as you aswell.

dlxowhd · Apr 4, 2009

i use seagate go 320gb and it doesn't freeze.
i think a lot of hard drives with 'energy save' or 'power save' will have this problem.

Kenney · Apr 4, 2009

I have a Freecom 2.5" Mobile Drive XXS which seems to have a sleep mode too (crashes in various games, like Mario Kart Wii (after pausing the game for 10 min. and returning the music is gone and once you finish the game crashes) and Animal Crossing (walking around the town goes fine but once you enter the city it goes black...). Inside is a Samsung drive and I've been Googling around but not found an answer yet on how to disable the sleep mode sadly.

KakTheInfected · Apr 5, 2009

Ooooh, so that's why my game locked up the other day after I went to watch a movie

knuttan · Apr 5, 2009

Kenney said:
I have a Freecom 2.5" Mobile Drive XXS which seems to have a sleep mode too (crashes in various games, like Mario Kart Wii (after pausing the game for 10 min. and returning the music is gone and once you finish the game crashes) and Animal Crossing (walking around the town goes fine but once you enter the city it goes black...). Inside is a Samsung drive and I've been Googling around but not found an answer yet on how to disable the sleep mode sadly.

Look into sdparm. A bit diffucult to use i think, but it might do the job.

nl255 · Apr 5, 2009

CUBEpro said:
twig123 said:

I'm experiencing lockups/freezing when using my Western Digital 80GB in an External Enclosure... I downloaded the above "Maxtor Manager" just for giggles, hoping it could look at the settings on my drive... but it doesn't see my drive (not that I really expected it to). Anybody else having the same issue with lockups on WD drives, and possibly have a solution?

Click to expand...

Maxtor Manager is probably only for maxtor/seagate drives. Wouldn't recommend it for other drives.

I had to format my drive to NTFS to get Maxtor Manager to recognize it. But atleast I got the sleep mode problem fixed!
Red_Dragon: Glad to help!

100th post! Took a while heh.

It shouldn't be a problem (as long as you stick with basic features like disabling sleep mode) as the SCSI commands (USB drives are treated as SCSI drives by most OSes and use the SCSI command set) are the same no matter what brand you use. If that weren't the case, sdparm would have to be updated every time a new drive came out.

Jeomite · Apr 5, 2009

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...

FenrirWolf · Apr 5, 2009

You guys should be sure to add this info to the USB devices compatibility list.

Kenney · Apr 5, 2009

knuttan said:
Look into sdparm. A bit diffucult to use i think, but it might do the job.

Hm, that doesn't seem to be working. Normally you would get simple stats like STANDBY but my drive only outputs things like IC, ABF, DISC etc...No idea what to do

magic12 · Apr 5, 2009

i hope this can be fixed with the new launcher version

kedest · Apr 5, 2009

Can't the launcher fix this? Let it write a tiny random piece of data every several minutes.

knuttan · Apr 5, 2009

kedest said:
Can't the launcher fix this? Let it write a tiny random piece of data every several minutes.

That would probably solve the problem. I've read about users doing this with a small script to counter drives spinning down when used on a computer. Just hope it's possible with the launcher.

Screemer · Apr 5, 2009

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

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