Samsung HDD Spindown

[Tesla]

Hi all,

I have a Samsung HM160HC 2.5" IDE HDD in an Akasa External enclosure.

The disk is connected to a games console.

The issue I am having is that the disk spins down too frequently.

The HDD seems to spin down in around 5 seconds. I have tried it connected to a PC via a USB enclosure and straight in a laptop.

Booted the Samsung HDD Utility and AAM is disabled. Have tried Fast and Quiet settings too with no effect. I think AAM just alters head/platter speed. Not anything to do with spindown.

Any ideas on how I can set spindown to never or a long period?

Just for testing have tried a different IDE disk (A 60GB Fuji) in the enclosure and after a few minutes it's still yet to spin down.

 

[Tesla]

The plot thickens...

I remembered that I actually have two of these drives.

I have used the second drive in exactly the same laptop and USB enclosure and it doesn't spin down at all!

I checked the drives out with Samsung's ESTOOL and they both have AAM disabled, smart enabled and the exact same firmware.

Checked the spinning down drive out with a full scan which it passed with no errors.

This is a really odd issue. I was fairly sure that this drive didn't used to spin down and I think I was correct as my second drive does not.

I have tried using hdparm under Linux but it's unable to read any data with the -S switch. Samsung's website states all power management is BIOS controlled with their HDD's...