As mentioned in my my previous post where I review the Samsung Story station, this external harddrive suffers from an annoying flaw: The drive spins down after 5 minutes of inactivity. This is highly irritating when watching a video, pausing it and trying to resume it after just 5 minutes. Notable hard disks that also suffer from this problem are some of the Western Digital WD Mybook external drives. The problem is that manufacturers provide no way to disable this annoying “feature”. Googling reveals there are many people who have a problem with their hard disks shutting down or spinning down and entering power savings mode after a couple of minutes, and I don’t really like any of the solutions presented.
So I coded HDDCoffee. It keeps your drive awake by accessing it every couple of minutes. The access interval is user defined. The program is coded in C#.NET and aimed to be light-weight and unobtrusive. It runs in your system tray and takes up minimal resources.
The app starts minimized, so just double click its icon in your system tray to select the drives it should keep awake and the access interval. Minimize it and the power-save problem is history. Download it here: HDDCoffee (HDDCoffee.zip 80KB)
HDDCoffee screenshot
You may notice that HDDCoffee is not licensed. This is because it’s barely 100 lines of code and anybody could write it in 30 minutes. If you like it, please leave a comment here. If you want to share it, be my guest. If you want to sell it, all the best!
22 comments ↓
I love this! Unfortunately, I’m using the Samsung Story drive on a Mac. Are there any similar Mac-compatible apps?
Thanks! Yes there are, though I haven’t tested a mac alternative. Look for http://www.google.co.za/search?q=mac+keep+drive+awake or http://www.google.co.za/search?q=osx+keep+drive+awake
This is exactly what i need, but it doesnt work. can you help?
See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.
************** Exception Text **************
System.OutOfMemoryException: List box contains too many items.
at System.Windows.Forms.ListBox.NativeAdd(Object item)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListBox.ObjectCollection.AddInternal(Object item)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListBox.ObjectCollection.Add(Object item)
at HDCoffee.Form1.Form1_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl()
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmShowWindow(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
************** Loaded Assemblies **************
mscorlib
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900)
CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework64/v2.0.50727/mscorlib.dll
—————————————-
HDCoffee
Assembly Version: 1.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 1.0.0.0
CodeBase: file:///C:/Users/Oded/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Start%20Menu/Programs/Startup/HDDCoffee.exe
—————————————-
System.Windows.Forms
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900)
CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Windows.Forms/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Windows.Forms.dll
—————————————-
System
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900)
CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.dll
—————————————-
System.Drawing
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.4927 (NetFXspW7.050727-4900)
CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Drawing/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Drawing.dll
—————————————-
************** JIT Debugging **************
To enable just-in-time (JIT) debugging, the .config file for this
application or computer (machine.config) must have the
jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section.
The application must also be compiled with debugging
enabled.
For example:
When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception
will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the computer
rather than be handled by this dialog box.
I’ve uploaded an update. Let me know if this doesn’t fix the issue.
Thak you for this great app, i have an samsung story too and the spin down is very annoying, have you sent an email to samsung about this problem? Can you make the app so it remembers the partition selected so when win starts up and the app starts too i dont have to select it every time. Again, thanks.
I’ve updated the app to detect when a drive is connected/disconnected. In hindsight this is critical functionality that I forgot to add. Please get the latest version.
Hello,
Will HDDCoffee work with a hard drive that’s only connected to a media player?
HDDCoffee is a windows app and requires a mouse or keyboard to configure. If your mediaplayer is running windows and supports .NET 2, it will work.
Thanks for the quick reply psichron.
The reason I asked the question is that I’m considering buying the Samsung Story hard drive to use with my Western Digital WDTV media player (the original, not the Live version). If I install HDDCoffee my concern is that, once disconnected from my PC will it still be active? If I understand correctly, this will be down to the WDTV. That being the case, I don’t know if if it supports .NET2?
Hi, sorry see you posted a previous comment but the notification got lost somewhere in my overcluttered inbox.
Unfortunately I don’t think what you describe will work. HDDCoffee keeps the drive awake by creating a small (less than 10bytes) file on it and deleting it straight away, so the drive needs to be connected to a system that HDDCoffee is running on. It doesn’t change any firmware settings of the drive itself to keep it awake. The Samsung story station might not be the best for your media player if you need it to be awake all the time.
I had a feeling that’d be the case. Shame, as the Samsung would have been a good choice. I hope that the company offers the option of disabling or adjusting the power save mode in future firmware – It’s lost a sale with me.
Thanks again for your help, psichron.
Hi. I have accidentally fallen on this discussion when I was looking for reviews for the Samsung Story. Btw, your review was very useful to me, I bought it 2 days ago. I have also downloaded HDDcoffee but did not have yet the chance to test it, I hope to do it in the weekend. Anyway, thanks for sharing it for free!
Now, I have a small request to you if you have time and are willing to do: I would need an application similar to HDDcoffee but nt for keeping awake a HDD but for preventing a screen saver. Here’s my issue: on the company’s notebook we have set by default a 15 minutes timer for the screen saver for security reasons. This is ok when in the office but, sometimes, at home, or in business trip, or else I like to watch movies on this PC and you may realise, during the best scene of the movie, when I forget about the world (and about moving the mouse every 14 minutes), the screen saver pops up and cuts the video and then I need to re-introduce the unlocking password and … all the excitement is gone …
But I am too long already … so this little program should simulate the pressing of a key or the moving of the mouse. Can you do such thing? … and would you? I couldn’t thank you enough if you would …
Well, for now, thanks for reading this, at least …
Bye.
Hi Claudiu,
Thanks for the feedback! About your request: There are already apps that do just that.
First, try this: “Windows Media Player (WMP11 in my case) has an option “Allow Screensaver during playback” which you can deselect. Then you play any old video, and press pause.”
If that doesn’t work, check out these: http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/stopss/
or
http://software.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=746745
There are apps that do what HDDCoffee does as well, but I found that they didn’t operate as I wanted. I wrote HDDCoffee to be as small, unobtrusive and light-weight as possible.
great app there, psichron. bought myself a story station as well so i’ll guess hddcoffee will be a constant presence on my OS from now on. a big THANK YOU
Hi psichron , thanks for the great review and cool amp for the samsung story station. Just wanted to ask, I’ve read some post where this hard drive come fomatted in FAT32, so no files over 4GB, but most people are reformatting the drive for NTFS. Do you recommend this and how do you go about doing it if so. Thanks. mikejamm
Sorry, meant to say thanks for the cool HDDCoffee software “app”, not amp. lol! Thanks again.
Hi mikejamm, thanks for the words of support! Always nice to get a positive comment, let me know if there’s anything HDDCoffee still needs.
About formatting the drive: Yes, I can highly recommend formatting it in NTFS. It’s a 1.5TB /1TB drive, presumably people who need that kind of space are going to be working with files larger than 4GB which is the FAT32 filesize limit as you said.
The utilities that come with the drive is useless to me, you can see whether you think they are interesting but I just deleted them. Then to format: In windows, open control panel -> Administrative Tools (Use search if you are using Win7) -> Computer management. In the left column select “Disk Management” under “Storage”. In the middle-top column, select the Samsung story station (The one with a capacity of 1397.26GB). Right-click on it and say “Format” or otherwise “Delete Volume”. Here you can make custom paritions for the drive if you want, I just use a single large partition. Then just tell it to format it with NTFS (Important: Select the “Quick Format” checkbox, otherwise you’re going to wait hours to format!!!). If you have any trouble just google a little, you should find an answer. The most important thing is to check the “quick format” checkbox…
Has anybody opened their 1.5/1.0 Samsung Story Station to discover which model Samsung drive is installed? I’m curious to know this before I buy.
As far as I know it is the Samsung ecogreen F2: “While it’s still not nearly as capacious as Western Digital’s latest green hard drive, Samsung’s 1.5TB EcoGreen F2EG is still plenty roomy for most. Of course, we’re still trying to decide if both “Eco” and “Green” were really necessary in the model name, but we digress. The drive sports 500GB per platter, and reportedly, it sucks down less power (around 40 percent less, in fact) than most HDDs thanks to the awesomely named EcoTriangle technology.”
Great job with HDDCoffee!! I had the same problem (not so hard but at little disturbing) with my Samsung Story HDD. Now, it works OK, thank you!
c.c.
I use the samsung story plugged into my xbox 360 for viewing films. The power down occurs when you want to pause the film come back after 5 minutes. Its a bit of hassle but not a deal breaker. Saying that i think i would be more upset if all my films were lost because the hdd had overheated because its on all the time. One question if you turn the switch on and it clicks on then you keep turning the LED it gets brighter does this mean something??? what is the purpose of the LED getting brighter? any ideas??? Thanks in advance
The nice thing about the story station is that the aluminium chassis is excellent for keeping it cool so it won’t overheat even if it doesn’t spin down. There is no purpose to the LED getting brighter, it’s just for the look, it doesn’t do anything else.
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