I bought a penguin gear usb 2.0 external hard drive enclosure and a
samsung internal hard drive (links below) to make a cheap external
hard drive for my computer.  It works great, except that the hard
drive runs at full speed all the time.  I'd like it to sleep, but I
can't figure out how and samsung says I need to talk to penguin gear,
and penguin gear doesn't respond to emails, has no phone number on
their website, and registered their website through an anonymous
domain name server.

Bonus to anyone who can figure out how to get samsung's drive to
change to quiet mode (there's a drive, but it works on internal
drives).

This drive is fully accessable in windows XP pro, I see it in disk
management and can format it and defrag...


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145225
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822152031

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Clarification of Question by isaaclevy-ga on 24 Jan 2006 16:48 PST

I mis-typed the part in ()... What I mean was Samsung has a driver,
but it only works on internal hard drives, as you have to make a
bootable floppy.

click start - right click on my computer - click properties - click on
the hardware tab - click on device manager - double click on universal
serial bus controllers - right click on usb root hub - click on
properties - click on the power management tab - check the box next to
allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Done. You
can tell if this works... when you access the drive it should hesitate
before populating the screen with files.

Hope this helps

Chris Brown
President
Speedy's Cash Register, Inc.

on the quiet mode thing you should be able to run the files - click
start - click run - type cmd - hit enter - type a: - hit enter - then
you can type the name of the executable file to run the utility. this
may or may not work if it doesn't let me know and i may be able to
hook you up with a $10 pci card that would give you 4 more ide
devices.

Chris Brown
President
Speedy's Cash Register, Inc.

Even if its not plugged into USB the hard drive still runs full. 
Won't that just shut down the usb port to save power?

Oh, its a laptop, wouldn't be much help :)...  I had tried the exe... 
It doesn't work in cmd either...

http://tinyurl.com/cfqt9

yeah if it runs full speed when the usb isn't hooked the usb root hub
power management might not do anything.

hmmmm

give me a couple of min and i might have something for you.

ok this is way out there, highly involved, has a small possibility of
not working, and will probably be an eye sore. you could solder a wire
from pin #1 of the usb cable to a relay that would cut power to the hd
when power was cut off to the usb cable. I would only try this as a
last resort. if there is any way to return the penguin you might try a
different brand. I'm sure there is another brand that already has this
feature built into it.

If you get brave and try to go with the top idea let me know and i
will help you as much i can. But hopefully one of the "paid"
researchers will come up with an idea worth your "money".

sorry i couldn't be of more help


Chris Brown
President
Speedy Cash Register, Inc.
www.SpeedyCashRegister.com

I mean, right now I just turn it off when I'm not using it...  Which
is ok, but not ideal.

I should have bought a real external hard drive.  Instead of an
enclosure... It was stupid, I thought it was cheaper but it wasn't...