Hacking Freeagent go external drive question

[corl45]

Alright, so I bought a Seagate Free Agent Go drive 320gb, but I had a laptop with a 230gb hard drive. So I opened up my free agent go drive and took the hard drive out and put it in my laptop, I then took the laptop drive and put it in the Free Agent Go enclosure.

So basically there is a Western Digital 230 gig hard drive inside of a Free Agent Go external case, that I am using to play my backups.

After some messing around I got it to work, and it now loads games just fine. So I started up Guitar Hero: World Tour and started up a song located on the disk (to see if loading was faster) and it started up, but half-way through the song the music started looping the same 2 seconds but the notes kept comming. If i press start it freezes, and when the song finishes it freezes

My guess would be that the notes load all at once from the song file on the disk (or ISO in my case) but the song it too big to load all at once to it continually pulls from the ISO to read the song, and somehow the Free Agent Go drive spin down problem is kicking in and causing the song to loop.

THis problem doesn't happen on short songs, and if I play the same song over again, it always happens in the same spot.


Assuming that the problem is the drive spinning down, how would I fix this if the drive does not have the required software on it, as it is Western Digital?

 

[Fishaman P]

I have 1 idea: Rip the .brstm files from the game, turn off the game volume when you play, and play the .brstm files in Winamp, synced to the notes. That's all I got

BTW, you have a strange mind, buying a Seagate.

 

[corl45]

I actually recieved it for free =) just said bought for the sake of simplicity

 

[thesund0g]

Go to the WD site and get the tools from there. Just look for the part # on the drive itself. Or, get something generic that lets you send SMART commands to the drive and do it that way. I think I used a command-line tool for that called SmartMonTools.

 

[resincake]

If you go to the 'freeagent' site, thats seagate btw, you can download specific software to alter/turn off spindown (drive powersaving mode), for their freeagent drives. My freind has a freeagent and they had to get the software to disable spindown, too, so that the games play properly on it.

Hope that helps. Good Luck with it.

EDIT: Just noticed you took apart your freeagent and switched the HDD, so I doubt the freeagent tools will help. I'd do what the poster above said, see if WD have software, or try a generic tool, perhaps HDD Tools or HDparm may help.

 

[corl45]

Go to the WD site and get the tools from there. Just look for the part # on the drive itself. Or, get something generic that lets you send SMART commands to the drive and do it that way. I think I used a command-line tool for that called SmartMonTools.

I downloaded smartmontools and can't figure out how to disable spin down, I don't have a problem with it being command prompt based. In my opinion it's not very well put together, confusing. any help?

Edit:
Upon further examination, many of the Western Digital laptop and external hard drives have built in Automatic Spin Down, which sleeps automatically after 10 minutes, and there is no way to disable it, from what I understand. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[User423]

BTW, you have a strange mind, buying a Seagate.

Why?

 

[thesund0g]

Wow, this isn't pretty, but check it out: http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/spindown.php
Doesn't appear to be a solution in itself, but it's worth reading up on.

Edit: Here you go: http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/
Surely that has something.

Go to the WD site and get the tools from there. Just look for the part # on the drive itself. Or, get something generic that lets you send SMART commands to the drive and do it that way. I think I used a command-line tool for that called SmartMonTools.

I downloaded smartmontools and can't figure out how to disable spin down, I don't have a problem with it being command prompt based. In my opinion it's not very well put together, confusing. any help?

Edit:
Upon further examination, many of the Western Digital laptop and external hard drives have built in Automatic Spin Down, which sleeps automatically after 10 minutes, and there is no way to disable it, from what I understand. Correct me if I'm wrong.