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.

Hm, I had thought that this was controlled by the drive itself, not by the Pogoplug. I have a Maxtor OneTouch and it spins down automatically after a designated period of time. The only downside of this is that it takes a second to spin up when I attempt to access it via Pogoplug, but that's it.

One way or another, overheating drives are bad! I'll pass this on and see if anyone else has an idea of what might be going on, short of having you submit a support ticket.

Peter Redmer
Administrator
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Chris,

Drives may supposed to run for 5 years. But when I am using my WD 1TB Passport,
it is overheated in 4 days. I don't wait for warranty and don't want to go to company back as there is no point when I lose my valuable data.
(I may get a new drive...but it sucks).

Just check with any WD passport drive and schedule some operations lik
Transcoding then you can find yourself drive is overheated.

Strongly I feel that Pogoplug has to offer some feature to put drive to sleep mode. Whatever you are saying it doesn't offer any solution for overheated portable drives.

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The way to check if Pogoplug suppose to spin down your drive is to disconnect it (USB)
from your Pogoplug or whatever you have it plugged into.
I noticed with my three drives did not spin down unless they were connected to the computer. When connected to the Pogoplug they did not spin down.
Try it yourself. Does your drive spin down when not connected via USB ?
This must mean the Pogoplug does not have any control built in to spin down a connected drive,
while the computer has a USB control to the drive's spin mode.

I have the same problems.
I tried 3 different usb disks and all were spinning all the time.
Even after hours they keep on spinning.
They get very hot and i am afraid it will shorten its life-time.

Can you tell me what to do else I will not use the pogoplug.

Thanks for any answers

I use flash drives for most of my systems except for my Pro which I use WD usb for Time Machine Backup. I am using Optware on this, so I use one of the packages, sdparm to spin down the hard drive. The command is "sdparm --command=stop /dev/sdb" (or /dev/whatever it is on your system). It will not spin again until there is a drive access or the command "sdparm --command=start /dev/sdb" is given. The page that has the sdparm information is http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/SpinDownUSBHarddisks about 2/3 of the way down the page. The only problem may be that the web site may poll the drive once in a while and spin up the drive.

I attached a 2 year old La Cie 500gb drive to my pogoplug. Here's what I can tell:

1. When attached to the pogoplug, the drive will not spin down after 24 hours, but if I go to the web setting and eject it, it will spin down immediately.
2. When attached to a computer (Mac), it will spin down, probably somwhere between 15-30 minutes, when I try to access the drive it will spin up again.
3. When attached to an Apple Time Capsule (current version) and use the drive as an air disk, the drive will spin down after a few minutes after accessing to it.
4. When the drive is not attaching to anything the drive will spin down.

I am not a developer, but from what I have seen, this is highly likely a pogo plug issue (may be with specific drives). I also have a WD 2TB attached to the time capsule, but I am not going to risk the data in it to test it with the pogo plug. (I had bad data lost experience a year ago with pogo plug when I tested it, I shelved the pogo plug until now to see if the new firmware is more trustworthy).

Ok Chris,
Item 1, 4, and 7 seem to be in contradiction Item 2. The commands sdparm and especially hdparm have been around and known to the Linux community. Some USB sata controllers emulate scsi well enough to recognize the command set. Contrary to the theme of this topic, most use the command to keep the drive spinning to eliminate spin-up time when they access the drive. They are not a universal solution since they only work with certain controllers (if your drive already parks itself after a certain interval then no problem). I have a USB WD sata controller and when I issue the sdparm command, it is immediate and gives me status information (plus you can hear it, feel it, and the access light status is a giveaway). I don't use the web interface much, only when I travel so my system is not polled otherwise. The pogoplug developers have to have a way of updating the status of the drive on their web site, so they poll the drive (probably at regular intervals) which if it was parked will cause it to spin up. It would be nice for one of the cloud engines developer to respond to this.
Finally the actual solution for those here is in item 1 of JimmyC and eject it. Also, you have to make sure that a client computer is not performing a read/write operation within the interval. Basically, don't blame the plug if another system is accessing it. It is not a firmware problem because after 5 minutes my drive spins down since the web interface is not getting status, until Time Machine or another application accesses it.

'Nuff said?

The sdparm command does support spindown, depending on the drive controller. Nowhere in the sdparm docs/man pages negate this. It does not require the umount command. When I issue the command, it is immediate (not any automate spindown time). No magic bits flying from the plug to the controller around the usb interface.