Hacking My HDD goes to sleep mode but only on the Wii, why?

[Shinigami Kiba]

Earlier I made a topic asking if DK Jungle Beat had some fade protection or something, after a whole bunch of troubleshooting and people responding we came to the conclusion that it was just my hard drive, so i did some more testing and it turns out that on the Wii the hard drive goes to sleep mode no matter what after about 20 minutes or so.
It appears this problem started happening only recently because I don't recall having this issue after setting the power settings to Never.

SeaGate FreeAgent Go 320GB

- I set the Power Settings to Never before formatting to WBFS back then, I reofomratted to NTFS from WBFS because I intitally didn't change the power settings and the HDD would go in standby after 5 minutes of inactivity(default value), setting it to never while on WBFS for me didn't work so I had to reformat back to NTFS, set it to Never and then format to WBFS again, this worked until today.

- Earlier i noticed DKJB freezing up, turns out the hard drive goes to sleep mode after about 10 minutes if it's left idling with no data being read from it

- I changed the standby timer in the SeaGate Manager from Never to 5 hours and that seemes to have helped, the hard drive now lasts around 20 minutes before going to standby if no data is read or written to it on the Wii

- On the Wii I use Rune Factory for testing this even tho the HDD has a led(sometimes the led doesnt turn on but the HDD works fine on the Wii). Rune Factory is the perfect game for testing this since it has small areas that preload once and don't load new data unless you do something like access the menu or change a new area, so if a hard drive goes to sleep mode the game freezes when you try to do this.

- I left the HDD idle in Windows for over 30 minutes just now, no writing or rading from it, it's WBFS so Windows can't read it even if it wanted to, no activity whatsoever and it did NOT go to sleep mode.
So, it only goes to Standby on the Wii.

I tried it with both USB Loader GX and Ultimate USB Loader and it seems it goes to standby after around 20 minutes now on both.

Any help would be appreciated so as long as it doesn't involve me formatting back to NTFS cause that would take hours and I don't have enough free space on the PC to backup all my games.

Sorry for making another topic about this, but the other one was more about Donkey Kong, now that we established the problem is with the HDD, since we can't edit topic ttiles I had to make a new one.

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

I think I know why the HDD goes in sleep mode on the wii but not on PC, it's 2:05AM now, the HDD's been on since before I made this topic and the led is still on I just activated it with WBFS Manager, loaded it up and it didn't really act as if it was turning on so it was on all this time.

The problem is, from what I can tell that Wii games are programmed or the Wii itself to stop the disc drive from spinning after a prolonged idle time, since the game thinks the HDD is a disc it does the same.
The disc doesn't work like at all except for the normal quiet spinning to indicate that it's on while you play DK Jungle Beat from it and it only actually activates when loading new data.
It's the same with many other games, but I think there's another thing in there that basically shuts off the disc drive entirely after a prolonged time of inactivity and then makes it resume working once you resume playing, this when running games from a hard drive causes the hard drive to be sent in Standby/Sleep Mode, when you resume playing it DOES power back on but it's too late sine it can't seem to pick up where it left off unlike the DVD drive.

This is why my HDD goes to sleep mode on the Wii after about 20 minutes or so where as it's on all the time on PC despite being inactive.
It has nothing to do with the HDD's built-in standby timer but rather the one Wii games or the Wii itself have for the disc drive.

Thing is, maybe other drives aren't affected by this, maybe they can resume working from where they left off but it seems mine can't.

 

[OncleJulien]

i have the seagate free agent 500, purchased for $80 from best buy, and it honors the spin down/sleep settings in the seagate drive software just fine, on wii and off.

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

I thought mine did as well, but do me a favor, try leaving it on for over 20 minutes in the house in Rune Factory, see if the HDD turns off after that, if it does resume playing and try leaving the house.

Or hell, you could try it with any other game, but Rune Factory is the easiest one to test this with because of the way it works, i guess animal crossing would work too if it loads new stuff every time you change areas

 

[jpfn19]

I have a Lacie HDD 250 gb, and I think it have the spindown problem, because when I'm playing a game it always crash past a few minutes.

IS there a way(a software to manage the HDD options or a USB Loader that prevent the HDD from spindown) to solve this problem?

Thanks

 

[manias]

I have a Lacie HDD 250 gb, and I think it have the spindown problem, because when I'm playing a game it always crash past a few minutes.

IS there a way(a software to manage the HDD options or a USB Loader that prevent the HDD from spindown) to solve this problem?

Thanks

read the other threads, seagate is the only one who has it's own software, rest has to be installed in a pc and hdparm can help. But this is just about seagates

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

Maxtor HDDs use the same softoware as SeaGate
But, from what I can tell any HDD would power down after about 20 minutes of inactivity regardless of sleep settings, read my second post i think it makes perfect sense, it's just that some hard drives probably don't have a problem to pick up where they left off after powering back on when the game is removed so people don't notice the HDD does indeed stop working after 20 minutes or so.

 

[DPyro]

Yep, my 500GB Lacie is slow to spin up. But my 120GB Lacie laptop drive has no problem. I noticed this after plugging it into my PVR and skipping ahead. It's much more responsive than the 500GB drive.

 

[jarock]

It also has a lot to do with your enclosure.
I have a Fujitsu oem laptop drive. I bought an enclosure on ebay for a couple of euro.
Put my drive into it and thought cool works. but after maybe a few minutes 10 - 20 playing games would freeze, it depended on the games and some games did not freeze. Many intense games like COD and the like. Other games like Wii sports and stuff were fine.
What I found out was that it was not a spin-down problem but the fact that the drive kept losing connection to the wii. On my PC was 100% perfect. The graphic intense games read more info off the drive and are constantly loading from it so a quick loss in connection would crash the game. The lesser games load and only access the drive when needed so if the drive stopped working for a sec then reconnected it would be fine if the games was running from the Wii memory / cache whatever.

Long story short I bought a new more expensive better enclosure with a built in usb adapter, put my hd in and non of my games have frozen since. This might or not be the case with yours as you have an all in one built in hd but it could be possible that your drive is losing connection so just a note to say that the enclosure is also very important.

 

[manias]

Maxtor HDDs use the same softoware as SeaGate
But, from what I can tell any HDD would power down after about 20 minutes of inactivity regardless of sleep settings, read my second post i think it makes perfect sense, it's just that some hard drives probably don't have a problem to pick up where they left off after powering back on when the game is removed so people don't notice the HDD does indeed stop working after 20 minutes or so.

not ANY hdd, yours

lotsa ppl have no probs with seagates!

 

[ploggy]

I've got a 160GB Seagate Barracuda connected to the Wii with an ide to usb adapter and it's powered with a molex cable in my Xbox.
The problem is all the games i've tested crash due to spindown issues, i've tried using the Seagate tool but the program doesn't recognised it.
Does anybody know for definate if the new Cios with fix the spindown problem?