Western Digital MyBook 500GB

[TheDarkestStar]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this belongs in this category but since it's hardware related, it seems to fit. Anyway, I have a WD myBook 500gb USB drive that keeps timing out after ten minutes of inactivity. Needless to say, this is awfully irritating, especially since whenever it happens Konqueror seems to have a fit and doesn't update the directory listings properly anymore -- even after hitting refresh over and over again...

So, my question is, is there a way I can set up my machine to touch a file on the drive every nine minutes or so to keep it from timing out but only have it do it whenever the drive is mounted? I know, I'm asking a lot but I can't imagine I'm the only one with that sort of problem out there and since there doesn't seem to be a way to disable this highly irritating "feature" on the drive itself I'll need to explore other avenues of keeping the platters spinning...

If it makes a difference, I'm running Debian Lenny with KDE 3.5 as my desktop.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!! :)

[GmarAppledude]

If you can write a script to touch file file and run it using cron that may do the job but please don't ask me how as I am a bit rusty to say the least.

[rdeschene2]

I don't have a USB drive so I can't try this out, however, could you possibly use hdparm to set the standby to "no standby" ? See man hdparm. I think this is of the format: hdparm -S 0 /dev/hda Might want to look at the -B option as well.

If you want or or need to do this via a cronjob, can you use the find command in a cronjob to force it to find a file you know is there ?
i.e. run "find /path/filethatisthere" every 9 minutes

[yesca]

I had a similar problem with a seagate "free agent" and running the following command fixed it:

sdparm -a /dev/sdaX

Found the fix here:
http://www.cgkreality.com/2007/11/27/seagate-freeagent-idle-under-linux/

[lazybird]

Well is that work?