Our engineers love this idea! Current power draw of the Pogoplug with drive attached is ~4 watts (about half of a closed tv on standby!) so we appreciate saving power and your drive :) We'll keep you posted on progress.

- jed

I just had to send a 1TB drive in for warranty repair after it was only 3 months old. This seems to be related from spinning constantly for that time. This function should be very important to keep from burning out the hard drives.

I really appreciate this feature. My portable hard drives are very hot just after 3 days connected to pogoplug..I was shutting down pogoplug and restarting.
It is time taking process.

Guys Take a hint from Apple. Get it right the first time, and think about things beyond the visual range of average people and delight your customers.

Had I been making a device like the pogoplug, the power management would be have been on my high priority list, because as you know you have no control over HDD quality/reliability, so atleast you could have done your part to put them in sleep mode. It should not take a programmer longer than a few hours tops, to put in a code for this. All the other gimicky features you are working on are useless if the drive itself dies.Think about it!!

Untill I get this feature, my pogoplug just sits disconnected called into action on need basis, and then as well itry not to turn it on because of the hassle.

@Rohan

> Guys Take a hint from Apple. Get it right the first time...

Easily said, but a bit of a myth. Apple ran into a very similar problem with the first iteration of the iPod back in 2001. Instead of reading as much of the current track into memory as RAM-space would allow and then letting the drive rest (earlier hard drive MP3 players like the PJB and the NJB had learned to do this), the 1G iPod played continually direct from the hard drive. Result: heat, drive wear, short battery cycle life.

This did not delight Apple's customers...

--
Chris

Hmmm... I didn't realize this, and I've been using the pogo to keep copies of all my pics since retiring the DNS-323. Looks like I may need to put that beast back in service!
I think I'll keep copies of everything on a pogo-attached drive on my local PC or aforementioned NAS, then just get warranty replacement drives as each one burns out.
This is a downer.. My avatar will now cry a single tear.

If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0

I have got same issue. My Western Digital passport 1tb drive got overheated
just by connecting after 4 days, accessing data may be once in two days just for 5 minutes.

Now I am ejecting drive once in a day. I believe if this is the case,
definitely portable drives get damaged. These drives are not to use with Pogoplug unless they have fan inside.

I am not sure wether you guys are going to take care or not.
Otherwise, I have to return my pogoplug as I am not able to use with my
WD passport drives.

I have connected two WD Passport drives (500gb, 1tb) and one simpletech simpleshare drive(500gb) all are getting overheated.

I believe POGOPLUG Support can fix it with some effort.
If people get frustrated with it, it is a damage for pogoplug.

> this overheating constant spinning drive issue will eventually catch up to me.

I think we may be over-cooking this issue (rather than the drives).

Here's my brief, non-authoritative take on this:

The drives are designed to last for five years. They don't really care whether they're continuously on or switched on and off per use. They probably marginally prefer to be left continuously on, as the power up and power down introduces electrical surges and mechanical strains.

Laptop manufacturers like switching these drives on and off, so that they can sell you 3, 5, 8 or whatever hours of battery life. Power economy is the only reason they do this. It's nothing to do with preserving the life of the drives.

Attached to your mains-powered Pogoplug this power economy issue more or less vanishes to zero. You'll save some iotas of watt-hours by powering the drives down when not in use, but it's probably trivial compared to what all your other devices are eating up by being left on standby.

Yes, your drives may get warm when left on continuously. As Maxwell was so fond of saying: entropy increases -- get over it. Provided that heat has room to convect nicely away, your drives will stay within their operating thermal parameters.

Just my 2c's worth -- yours for free... :-)

--
Chris

> The drive manufacturers (in my case, Seagate) thought that allowing the
> drive to turn off - spin down, go to sleep - was important enough to
> design into the product,

I don't think I know exactly what you mean by "the product". Are you talking about the drive, or a drive+enclosure product like the FreeAgent Go? My remarks were intended to refer only to the drives.

Yes, I believe by default the FreeAgent Go does power down after being idle for 15 mins, but I understand that this is a feature of the enclosure. I haven't been able to find a Mac version of the FreeAgent Go Tools, but the Windows version allows you to change this interval, and also offers the option of "Never". Draw your own conclusion from this; mine is that continuous running is a manufacturer-sanctioned option, which is kind of what I was trying to say in my earlier post.

> ..and in fact make it the default behavior. It should work that way.

So I'm not sure you can jump to that conclusion.

> Since the drives do spin down when connected directly to the Mac

I've seen Web posts from Mac users saying this is a nuisance and they'd prefer continuous running... :-)

> there
> has to be something different, and I'd like to understand it.

Absolutely agree. My feeling is that products like the FreeAgent Go are primarily designed for use with laptops, and therefore default to laptop-style shutdowns. But -- as I say (and this is all I'm saying) I don't believe continuous running will shorten the life of the drive. Like you, I'd certainly like to know more about this.

--
Chris

If I read this aright, that's >12TB. Under the control of a 5watt machine.

Wow!

What's the application, Doug? Are you sure the Pogoplug is the right kit for this?

--
Chris

> I don't know for sure but I suspect the there is just one "host" inside
> the Pogoplug, with 4 connectors. In my case each of those goes to a
> powered hub, and each of the drives is self powered too.

ISTR the Pogoplug has a pair of USB host controllers, each with a pair of ports on it.

> Still with all these drives (getting back on topic) the back of my rack
> gets pretty warm, and thus just wasteful when I'm not actually
> reading/writing data.

Yes, I see your point. I had no idea you were piling so much storage onto the thing.

I still stand by my proposition that the drives aren't suffering, but I agree that your drive array needs to be discouraged from warming the planet. I looked into this issue earlier this year, and as I recall, came to the following work-in-progress conclusions:

USB drives are great for casual hook-ups, but not the preferred mode for permanent installations. This isn't so much that they're slower than either SATA or PATA, but because they're less controllable. AIUI there's a cross-manufacturer standard for sending drives to sleep across the PATA/SATA interface, and Linux understand this. A USB drive enclosure understands this too, internally, but surfaces this to the USB connector in a variety of proprietary ways that Linux hasn't been able to keep track of.

Does this make sense, Doug?

--
Chris

> I dont understand why "Mr. bidmead" vehemently opposes the Idea
> obasic power management for the pogoplug connected external HDD.

It's a mistake in the first place, rohan, to take up cudgels against any argument you don't understand. Understand the argument first, would be my tip... :-)

But in any case, where on earth do you get the idea that I'm "vehementsly opposed to... power management"? Or even mildly opposed to it?

To save you having to read my posts on this, let me sum up:

1) Lack of power management doesn't necessarily shorten the life of your drive.

2) If you want to be sure of power management, use a device that communicates reliably through a PATA or SATA interface; these support industry standard protocols for accomplishing this. I don't think USB Mass Storage does, but if you know differently, do please pitch in with some information.

3) Er... that's it.

--
Chris

Andy Moretron said: ... a 2.5 inch drive may be the best option.

Automatic spin-down isn't a function of the size of the drive, Andy, it's a feature of the SATA-to-USB controller in the drive enclosure.  Some drive enclosures work like this, it appears, and some don't.

The problem is this: you really want the spin-down interval (0 to whatever) to be controllable from the operating system.  In the case of the PogoPlug this would be an option in the Web interface Settings menu.  But CE can't offer this because USB attached drives don't have a protocol to control spin-down (as far as I've been able to ascertain).

An option might be to have the Pogoplug simply switch off the power to the relevant USB socket.  But this would be equivalent to abruptly unplugging the drive, with the risk of damaging the file system.  I can envisage some kind of umount -> power off -> mount sequence that might mimic the SATA spin-down protocol at a higher level (and I guess a much higher latency), but I don't know what the practical effects of this might be.

--

Chris