Raspberry Pi Forums

I have two externally powered harddrives connected to my rasp B and both of the drives are accessible through smb and mount fine during boot up. just one of the hdd just sleeps after a little while and wont wake up on its own. is there a command that I can use so I can wake it up or a setting I can put in? the first one falls asleep too but will automatically wake when I try to access the smb share on it. the other just says it cant connect and I have to cycle the power for everything to get them working fine again. shut the pi off then shut the harddrives down and then restart the hdd and then reboot the pi. not a fun dance to do every time you want to use a hdd.

Use smarttools to dump the statistics for the drive and see what has been going on. Some "green" drives spin down the disk rather quickly upon a lack of use. It should come back automatically however, but perhaps Linux is timing out the drive before it is up to speed. Have a look at the output of "dmesg" after the fault has been experienced. Here's a nice summary of the situation with Western Digital drives. Some other drives can use hdparm to alter the spindown time.

k I'll try that out next time I can find the time to play with it. thanks! sorry it took me a while to respond.