I have a Western Digital Elements 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive connected to my PP 24/7. Although it remains powered (and accessible) the entire time, it only spins up when being accessed. (Same for my Samsung S2 drive).
The PP will spin down the drives when they are not being used. Although, if you look around in these forums, you will find people complaining about drives never spinning down. It is usually in reference to a particular brand etc.
As I said, my WD does spin down -- and others have reported this as well.

I have never sat by it and truly timed it -- but I am pretty sure that with no activity it is usually spun down by 5 minutes. You cannot (without logging in via ssh and doing some real linux hacking) change the settings on the PP. I doubt that you can on the HD either.

slacker said: The spindown issue is months and months old. The Pogoplug people have been ignoring it (search the forums, you'll see). Some people have drives that spin down automatically, but most of us don't. I bought this thing because it's low cost, but I'm really wishing I'd have spent the extra on a NAS, since the cost of new HDDs and the stress over whether this thing is going to kill my drive and all my photos is way more than this thing is worth.

Apparently you haven't been reading all of the comments or know to much about hard drives and external enclosures. Yes it is possible to change the spin down time and some other settings if your not affraid to alter the firmware of a hard drive. However once you connect that hard drive to enclosure, the enclosure's chipset becomes the interface between the pogo and the hard drive. Even if the pogo could tell the enclosure chipset to spin down its impossible to know if all the different manufacturers products have the capability to "listen" and pass that request on to the hard drive. As you said this topic has been beaten to death...at least read all of it before you regurgitate something so ignorant such as saying "...Pogoplug people have been ignoring it...".

Hello,

In general, any HDD connected to the Pogoplug should spindown when not in use. Keep in mind that if it's busy processing metadata or transcoding video for a drive with GIGs of content, that causes drive I/O even if you're not accessing it yourself via web or DriveApp.

While it's true that there has been talk of some drives not spinning down, the Pogoplug follows the USB "spec" - if you will - about what idle means. If a drive doesn't spindown, it almost always means the drive(or enclosure) maker did not fully obey the spindown spec. If a drive spins down connected to your PC, and yet does not spindown on a Pogoplug that is NOT running any kind of media-processing... support tickets should be created so that we can have a list of those and perhaps have a workaround someday to fix it.

EDIT: A drive that requires vendor software to be installed on the user's computer before it can be used, might be an important part to the puzzle of why the drive behaves well on the computer but not the Pogoplug.

Thanks,

The only limit to the Pogoplug is your imagination... and C skills... and linux skills. ^_^ h\t\tp://download.pogoplug.com/opensource/pogoplug-gcc.tar.bz2

Hello,


While some info about the drive model is available to the logs the support team can pull from a Pogoplug remotely, not all of it is.

If you could find the drives on a website that sells them, the specs tend to be there as well. Also, most spinning drives have stickers on them with a bunch of info. Those would help us as well.

Thanks,

The only limit to the Pogoplug is your imagination... and C skills... and linux skills. ^_^ h\t\tp://download.pogoplug.com/opensource/pogoplug-gcc.tar.bz2

Anyone using a hard drive for storage should keep a backup. First rule of computing is to never keep all your data on one drive!