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I have a hard drive in a caddy with USB and eSata connections and I have a smart TV. I would like to use the Hard Drive to record TV shows. When I plug the hard drive into the TV via the USB and press record it works great. But if I set the timer to start recording after 15 minutes it fails because the Hard Drive has gone into some sort of sleep mode. The drive inside I believe is a Winchester disk.

Is there anything I can tweak with a firmware utility to turn this sleep mode off as its preventing me from timer recording. I can plug the drive into a PC to tweak it, just need to know the software to run on it.

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I would place a higher chance on it having something to do with your USB dock. I have several different docks, and some of the implement some kind of sleeping and some don't. It probably cannot be re-configured you may just have to find an alternative. – Zoredache Dec 20 '11 at 22:59
What caddy? What zoredache said, there are external boxes that put the drive to sleep itself (not via the os). There are no-sleep software that works with the system, and a few very rare no-sleep type softwares that will actually write a small file to the hard drive to keep it awake (poor method but more likly to work). If you could test a simple batch that writes a file to that drive every 5 minutes, you could see if that would work. sleep, echo >file repeat. The tv software should not be failing because of a slow responce, but what can you do. – Psycogeek Dec 21 '11 at 5:29
for firmware it is very likly that you would need to change how the controller works not the drive, the USB to Hard drive controller. although there are hard drives that like to sleep to excess (green) it was the controller in the boxes for most of the stuff I read about. – Psycogeek Dec 21 '11 at 5:38
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Did you try to turn off USB port's power save option? – mephi Dec 21 '11 at 13:34
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