Hacking An idea to finally fix HDD spin down.

bandithedoge

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If you're an experienced developer, I literally beg you to read this.

I have some 500GB Seagate in a cheap Chinese enclosure. It spins down after ~10 minutes of inactivity and the Seagate software obviously won't fix it. But I have a very duct tape idea to finally stop it. Unfortunately I'm not a developer so I'd ask one to try it.

So my MacGyver idea is this: So the drive spins down after 10 minutes of inactivity. What if the loader, say, USBGX, made a .txt file on the USB HDD and wrote a short string to it every few minutes (adjustable from the menu)? I know, I'm not an experienced developer and I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm really desperate about this since I bought a Wii and it's now sitting unused due to games freezing. Well, at least WiiWare works, but that's on the internal NAND, not the USB.

If anyone is willing to implement this feature into USBGX or WiiFlow, I will be very grateful.
 

Cyan

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cIOS already have a random sector access (to prevent cache access) every minute.
some drive have that timer less than a minute, which can be problematic with current cIOS implementation of sleep prevention, but if your drive goes to sleep after more than one minute, there's something wrong.

unless you use IOS58 instead of cIOS. most homebrew use that IOS (nintendont, emulators, media players, etc.), only USB Loaders are using cIOS with the 1min wakeup.
I think nintendont implemented a similar random sector access to prevent sleep, so it shouldn't freeze after 1 minute of inactivity.


the problem could be while inside the USB Loader GX interface and when not using cIOS (for example IOS58), then I think you are right there's nothing preventing sleep mode.
but once into a game, there's a mandatory reload to cIOS and USBLoaderGX is not in memory anymore, there's no text file to be written or accessed.
Wii game freezing is not fixable by USB Loader GX. I can fix only drive going to sleep before launching a game. but to prevent that, just don't spend your time into the loader, launch the Wii when you already know what you want to play, and don't spend more than 1 minutes (10 for you) in USBLoaderGX interface.
 
Last edited by Cyan,
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