WD My Book sleep mode?

[sancco]

Hi I'm hoping someone can help me figure this out. I'm trying to make my external hard drive use some sort of sleep mode. At the moment it seems to run 24/7.

Most of the results in Google are how to disable it, so I'm having trouble researching it.

I've got Intel RST with Link Power disabled, but I believe that only affects internal hard drives? I'm not sure.
I've set USB power management mode to enabled in Windows Power Management.
I tried enabling sleep mode in WD SmartWare but it didn't seem to work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Dereck47]

I have a WD My Book Home Edition and I use WD Drive Manager to turn it off when I'm not using it.
It runs minimized in the Windows System Tray and I right-click on it to shut down my drive.
I then press the power button in the back of the drive when I want to turn it back on.

WD Drive Manager turns the drive off, so that is not the same as putting it to sleep, so I don't know if this will suit your needs or not.

If you want to use WD Drive Manager then read this link to see if it is compatible with your model of WD My Book: http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/WDDM_2.115_release_notes.pdf

If it is compatible with your drive then you can download it from this link:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=111&sid=89&lang=en

 

[sancco]

I have a WD My Book Home Edition and I use WD Drive Manager to turn it off when I'm not using it.
It runs minimized in the Windows System Tray and I right-click on it to shut down my drive.
I then press the power button in the back of the drive when I want to turn it back on.

WD Drive Manager turns the drive off, so that is not the same as putting it to sleep, so I don't know if this will suit your needs or not.

If you want to use WD Drive Manager then read this link to see if it is compatible with your model of WD My Book: http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/WDDM_2.115_release_notes.pdf

If it is compatible with your drive then you can download it from this link:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=111&sid=89&lang=en

Thanks for the detailed answer, but unfortunately I'm looking specifically for sleep mode. I have a backup script set for 4am every day so I need the drive to be accessible 24/7 but only woken up once a day.

 

[sancco]

I figured it out! If anyone is interested, here's how.

External hard drives are considered USB drives by Windows, so all I had to do was make sure USB Power Management was enabled (which is default), then set the sleep time in WD SmartWare and then make sure my HDD monitoring program wasn't accessing it. EZ PZ.