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I'm playing music from my hard drive and at routine intervals it stops playback and waits for my drive to spin up again (takes about 2-5 seconds).

Is there a way to fix or avoid this? It's a Buffalo portable 500gb drive (HD-PCT500U2/B).

I have no software for this hard drive since I'm running Linux so it's pretty much out of the question anyway.

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  • How soon does it go to sleep? Maybe that needs to be increased. Aug 1, 2014 at 5:14
  • The model is this: HD-PCT500U2/B. On this page It gives several options but none of them seem related to what I'm trying to do. Aug 1, 2014 at 7:00
  • It's not available for my model hard drive. Aug 1, 2014 at 7:55
  • You keep talking about this software. I don't know where you're getting this idea from. I have no tools available for this hard drive other than things like the "Ramdisk Utility" and other useless pieces of software that probably wouldn't work on linux anyways. So when you say that "the software is ... changing parameters on the driver/controller" it's axiomatically impossible. Aug 1, 2014 at 8:23
  • We have been changing the idle time for hard drives for 15 years now, so I guess impossibility evades me.
    – Psycogeek
    Aug 1, 2014 at 8:58

2 Answers 2

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Go under settings,preferences,option, or etc and look for a buffer setting. Increase it if it has one.

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  • I don't have any accompanying software for the hard disk. Are you suggesting I do that for every program that I want to load data? Aug 1, 2014 at 4:15
  • @theStandard I deleted a comment which said the same thing. If your external drive is just music, then yeah. Edit: Actually no, because it would still get stuck at the next track. Though it wouldn't stutter. Aug 1, 2014 at 5:15
  • It's not just music and I can't find a buffer option anywhere. Aug 1, 2014 at 5:20
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Not necessarily the best or most ideal solution for now, but you could run some small script in background, that will touch some file on the hard disk maybe once every 1-2 minutes.

This should keep the powersaving function from kicking in. Make sure to monitor the drive's temperature, but I don't think that should be a problem.


If you really don't have any way to access a real Windows PC, I'd suggest you install a virtual machine (such as VirtualBox).

You're able to download ready-to-run images of Windows installations right from Microsoft. Make sure to pick Linux and the Virtual machine you'd like to use. These images are provided for testing and evaluation purposes. You don't have to worry about buying a license key or anything.

In case of Virtual Box, you should be able to use the USB2 pass-through to directly install the Windows tools from Buffalo inside the virtual machine and use those to adjust the drive settings.

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