External HDD won't sleep

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sbowness

225 posts

Master Geek

Subscriber

#274439 22-Aug-2020 11:20

I have a Seagate 3TB Expansion Desktop drive. It's set to go into power saving mode after being inactive for 5 minutes and used to do that faithfully. I've recently changed motherboard and CPU and it will no longer sleep, which is annoying as it has quite a loud hum and gets quite warm.

I've tried a number of things. The activity LED on the drive keeps flashing, even though nothing is using it. The pattern is two short flashes and one long one. I've checked the Resource Monitor and there doesn't appear to be any application activity on that drive, although there is 0.01% active time every once in a while. It's almost as if something is using it, but I can't find what.

I've checked the settings using the Seagate Dashboard, and they appear to be fine. I've tried reducing the time to the lowest possibly setting (3 seconds) and that didn't make any difference. There were no other changes on my system, other than those associated with the new motherboard (ASUS TUF B450-PLUS GAMING) and CPU (AMD Ryzen 5 3600).

I have it in the back of my mind that I had to change something, possibly in the BIOS, when I first got the drive but I can't for the life of me remember what and Mr Google has been no help at all.

I'd be grateful for any help that anyone can give me, please.

K8Toledo

1014 posts

Uber Geek

#2547567 22-Aug-2020 11:36

Is USB suspend enabled under power options?

Tbh adjusting USB HDD idle timeout normally requires firmware flash.

If the chip is AsMedia try this tool

https://www.station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=352&func=select&id=534&lang=en

sbowness

225 posts

Master Geek

Subscriber

#2547574 22-Aug-2020 12:18

Thanks for the reply.

As I mentioned, it was working fine. I should be able to adjust this using Seagate Dashboard and it did work previously. The USB selective suspend setting is Enabled in the Power Options.

The asmedia tool does recognise my drive but I'm not sure what the next steps are. The instructions are not in English and I'm wary about bricking the drive.

K8Toledo

1014 posts

Uber Geek

#2547581 22-Aug-2020 12:53

sbowness:

Thanks for the reply.

As I mentioned, it was working fine. I should be able to adjust this using Seagate Dashboard and it did work previously. The USB selective suspend setting is Enabled in the Power Options.

The asmedia tool does recognise my drive but I'm not sure what the next steps are. The instructions are not in English and I'm wary about bricking the drive.

Possibly a process could be accessing the drive and not allowing it to sleep....

Which AsMedia controller does it show? 1051/1053? If you like I can edit the fw & let you flash it. I've flashed half a dozen AsMedia/JMicron controllers. The tool won't brick the drive :)

Also, where did you see the HDD idle timeout option in Dashboard?

sbowness

225 posts

Master Geek

Subscriber

#2547947 23-Aug-2020 08:20

Here's the screenshot from the Dashboard. I changed the time to 3 minutes to see if a change would trigger it to work:

And here's the screenshot from the tool:

As I say, this was working before the hardware change and it does have all of the indications of a process accessing it, it's just finding out which one.