I have all my digital media on a 2TB USB hard drive (w/the essential stuff backed up), and I use this drive to serve data to my Boxee Box. The only problem is that this drive seems to be set to spin down after about 5 minutes with no accessing. This makes starting a video on Boxee very slow, and what's even more annoying is that if I pause a video for 4-6 minutes (for people to use the restroom or get snacks), when I start playing it again, Boxee waits for the video for about 5 seconds before it quits back out to the video selection screen.

Part of this is Boxee's fault. It should be more graceful in handling these delays. I had the same problem with my WDTV and it would just wait until the video came.

Anyway, I was hoping that someone might know how I can control my USB hard drive a little more. I remember there used to be a setting in Windows that let me choose how long the system should wait before letting individual hard disks spin down. Was I dreaming that? Where did it go?

At the moment, when I know we're going to watch a good deal of stuff on Boxee, I've been playing a video from the drive on my computer on repeat to make sure the disk is always in use. I'd much rather tell the drive to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity. Can I do that? Or does it have to be an internal drive?

Boxee's software should be able to control this. Might be another thing to email them about.

I thought USB HD spindown was hit & miss depending on the exact chip used to interface between USB and PATA/SATA?

Quite possibly, I don't know about that. I didn't mean to imply that Boxee would set some prescribed setting to the HD chipset, but rather that a piece of software like Boxee could keep that disk spinning by periodically accessing it. This could be implemented as a setting in Boxee with a time-based preference.

Is this a drive attached directly to the Boxee Box, or connected to a server? If it's a server, or if there's some sort of alternative interface to the Boxee Box, just write a little script that reads some inconsequential piece of data every minute.

Beyond that, Trevor's right about it being hit-or-miss over the USB connection.

It's connected to my desktop at the other end of my network. I'd be fine with software like that, but I'd have to run it pretty much like I do my little video file playback trick already. I'll probably stick with that tactic for now.


Yeah, I was afraid of that. No matter.


Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. I might suggest that. I'm keeping a list of things to write them as I use the Box. This issue is about more than just Boxee, though. Occasionally I'll need the drive several times while on my computer, and it's annoying having to wait for it to spin up every single time. It's an inexpensive drive and pretty slow, so it takes at least 5-10 seconds for the drive to be usable.

Would there be any point in removing the drive from its enclosure and just putting it in the computer its self? I only bought it because it was on sale for less than internal drives were going for at the time. I don't need it to be USB. How would I control spin down times for internal drives?

If you directly attach the drive then you can use hdparm or another HD tool to alter the power management settings. The problem with USB enclosures is that most of them don't pass through the messages to allow you to control it. This is assuming it is a regular drive in there and that you can take it out.

A lot of the newest (last year or so) enclosure chips now pass ATA commands directly through to the drive (aka. "SAT"), which allows hdparm and kin to work over USB (at last!).

Cheers

About time! USB HDs have been out for how many years now?