Is the drive powering down entirely, as in shutting off? That could certainly be the problem, and I'm not sure that it would be due to the DockStar.

A lot of drives will spin down and sleep but stay on - this causes a short delay in the initial access at My.Pogoplug but is normal.

At this point, it doesn't seem like you are doing anything wrong - I would contact Pogoplug support to do some investigation into the specific drive you are using.

http://support.pogoplug.com/requests/anonymous/new

Peter Redmer
Administrator
Blog | Twitter

This is somewhat related...

I have a drive in an external enclosure that exhibits similar issue when connected via USB. Here are specs on drive:

1 Newer Technology MiniStack (FW400+USB2 version)
1 Western Digital 120GB Drive (WD1200JB-75CRA0)

The drive, when connected to a Western Digital TV HD Live Plus or to the non-plus version, it will spin down after an amount of inactivity.

I assumed that there is something that is part of the hard drive's firmware or some such that is doing energy saving.

I had the same issue to. I wrote a little C daemon which updates a 0 byte file on whatever drive you specify. This will keep the drive alive, regardless of the sleep code on its firmware.

The arm executable and source can be downloaded here:

http://my.pogoplug.com/share/8WUQCiaI71Rlrm46imnQJw/

Simply copy the program somewhere (make it executable) and give it an argument to the file you want it to "touch"

For example:

touchfiled-arm --file=/tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1/TOUCHFILE

In this case it updates "TOUCHFILE" with 0 bytes every 10 seconds. Should be sufficient to keep the disk alive.

You'll need a startup script so the daemon starts on boot. I can help with this, if needed.

While this is a simple program and it's working great for me, I obviously don't want to take any responsibility for any unintended consequences you might encounter. Just making this available because it solved the issue in my case.

(btw I also formated the USB drive ext3 rather than NTFS, for good measure --since the pogoplug is a linux machine after all and the disk is dedicated to it anyway)

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

void usage () {
	printf ("touchfiled --file=path-to-touchfile --file=path-to-touchfile...\n");
}

int main (int argc, char **argv) {

	char wakefiles[32][512];
	int c;
	int filecount = 0;
	FILE *fp;
	pid_t pid, sid;

	if (argc < 2) {
		usage();
		exit(1);
	}

	while (1) {
		int this_option_optind = optind ? optind : 1;
		int option_index = 0;
		static struct option long_options[] = {
			{"file", 1, 0, 'f'},
			{0, 0, 0, 0}
		};

		c = getopt_long (argc, argv, "abc:d:012", long_options, &option_index);
		if (c == -1)
			break;

		switch (c) {

			case 'f':
				printf ("daemon will touch file: '%s'\n", optarg);
				strcpy(wakefiles[filecount++], optarg);
				break;

			default:
				usage();
				exit(1);
		}
	}

	if (optind < argc) {
		printf ("non-option ARGV-elements: ");
		while (optind < argc)
			printf ("%s ", argv[optind++]);
		printf ("\n");
	}

        pid = fork();
        if (pid  0) {
                exit(0); /* exit parent */
        }

        umask(0);
                
        sid = setsid();
        if (sid < 0) {
                exit(2);
        }
        
        if ((chdir("/")) = 0; i--) {
			printf("%d: %s  ", i, wakefiles[i]);
			fp = fopen(wakefiles[i], "w");
			fclose(fp);
		}
		sleep(10); 
        }
exit(0);
}