External HHD power management

Is there a way to set an external hard drive so that it spins down after a certain duration of idle time?

 

Well, if I'm understanding what you're asking, HDD automatically spin down when they're not being used. They don't constantly spin. At least, none of my 8 HDD constantly spin.

 

I don't think that's true, at least not on the time scale I'm thinking. My Power Settings say "Turn off hard disks after 30 minutes." Does that mean after thirty minutes of no HDD activity, or thirty minutes of nothing at all? Also, I would like for this number to be much lower for my external hard drive: say 5 minutes for those and whatever for the internal drive. Can that be done?

 

spinning down and powering down are two different things.

OP asked for spinning down; which, yes, your HD is idle pretty much all the time... unless you're accessing the drive, it's idle

if you're asking how to power down, that's a different question.

 

I don't think that it's even spinning down, because I don't hear it spinning back up, unless I'm unclear on the definition of "spinning down."

 

My roommate has the Seagate 300GB external drive, and it turns itself off after few minutes of being idle, which's an excelent feature, and all you have to do to bring it back ON is through windows meaning you don't have to press the power button on the HDD enclosure. Just browse the hard drive in windows explorer and it starts spinning. But, my rosewell external HDD doesn't do that, it keeps on spinnign even if I leave it ON for 5 hours. It makes the same humming after being idle for 5 hours, as when I'm using it. I've been looking all over the internet for the standby feature and wether I can add it to my external HDD, but to no avail.

 

Right on zolo. That's exactly the problem I'm having. Any luck with your search?

 

The problem is that I want to hook up this external HDD to a wireless router that has a USB input, so I don't have to worry about the enclosure's USB & Power cables making a miss here. But I don't want to go to the External HDD to turn it ON/OFF every time I wana use it. So, the only thing I can think of is to replace the enclosure with one that has that feature. Sorry, I couldn't find any way else to do it in my enclosure.