WARNING: DLNA and HDD sleep time

[lwizard]

I want to warn everyone:

I was having problem with DLNA failing connection randomly (I'm on Merlin fw and AC-68U).

I was getting mad.

Than after several experiments I found that my Western Digital 2.5" elements spin down after few seconds of inactivity, thus also beetween cached parts of songs.
So when the router asked for next song or new part of song, sometimes the HDD was too slow in spinning up, giving errors.

I disabled sleep of HDD with a WD utility which disables this function in HDD's firmware.

Now everything works perfectly.

No problem with configurable spin down option in Merlin FW, you can enable that.

 

[RMerlin]

Probably a WD Caviar Green in there. The power management of these disks is ridiculous, making them unusable for anything but backups. Thankfully they made a tool available to disable that aggressive spindown.

 

[tikiman1]

You don't want to disable the sleep function completely. You want it to spin down when you're not using it. If I remember right, the stock spin down time was something like 8 seconds. I set all my Western Digital drives to 300 seconds, which is 5 minutes.