Hitachi Touro Pro - Different versions? Spinning down

[pioneer2000]

Well. I've had a 4TB Hitachi Touro Pro external drive for about a year now, working fine. I decided to purchase another one this week and the problems have begun.

The original drive was branded "Hitachi" and has a dark blue led. The new one is branded "Touro" and has a lighter coloured blue led. I assume this is a revised design since Western Digital bought out Hitachi HD... annoying.

More importantly, the original one does not spin down in a power saving fashion within Windows. The new one however seems to do this irrespective of what power settings I change through power management, and so i'm left with a hard drive that takes an age to spin up every 10 minutes or so. From what I understand this may be something set by the usb firmware of the drive, and so something I cannot change? Why would Western Digital do this FFS!

The original Touro was perfect, this new one plain annoying.

I've seen there's an application called "NoSleepHD" that writes a .txt file to the drive every 10mins to keep it spinning, but to have to use this is rather frustrating considering the other Touro doesn't need it.

Is there anything I can change / do to stop the drive spinning down?

 

[sastusbulbas]

I seem to remember there being two variants. One being 7200rpm the other 5400rpm and more eco. Could you have one of each?

 

[pioneer2000]

I seem to remember there being two variants. One being 7200rpm the other 5400rpm and more eco. Could you have one of each?

Nah, they're both the same pro version, with the same firmware version hard disk inside (verified by HD Tune Pro). Weirdly now that I notice it... the older one that never spins down is actually reporting at 61c! (it's been like this for an age though so not concerned about it too much) whereas the newer one is hovering around 31c... lol.

Clearly something has changed between model revisions, I'm still leaning towards a change in the onboard usb controller of the hard drive case, but unsure if there's anything I can do about it?

I've been using NoSleepHD to manually stop the hard drive spinning down, but this crashes unless opened as an administrator... anyway to get it to default to this upon system startup?