WMC and spinning up HD

[Mrbobb]

So my TV Recording HD spins up as my PC wakes up but it takes ~15s for it to mount. WMC doesn't seems to know this and a scheduled recording tasks fires up immediately and not finding the drive, goes bad.

How have you folks dealt with this? Other than don't spin down the drive!

[mdavej]

Can you ask Santa for an SSD?

[joecrow]

Something not right there. I have a WD 2TB HD that is used for all recordings, not sure how long it takes to come ready but I have never encountered a problem with recordings in this respect! The system disk is a SSD and it returns from sleep very rapidly! Others here may be able to point you towards a fix but I just wanted to comment that your problem is not, I believe, typical.

[Mike88]

If I understand you correctly, your recordings try to start immediately when the PC wakes up. However from my knowledge the PC supposed to wake up 5 minutes before the recording starts. And that's how mine works. If I pad the recording to start 2 minutes early and the PC wakes up 5 minutes before that, my PC wakes up 7 minutes before the program starts.

It sounds like yours is not doing that. I don't know what controls that 5 minute interval & hope someone can chime in to answer.

[Space]

WMC is supposed to schedule your machine to "wake up" about 5 minutes before the scheduled recording is to start, so you should not be having this problem.

Perhaps your drive is somehow going back to sleep again before the recording starts? Maybe an inactivity timeout or something?

You can look at the "Task Scheduler" in windows to see when the PC is set to "wake up" for the next recording...

Start "Task Scheduler"

Go to "Task Scheduler" -> "Task Scheduler Library" -> "Microsoft" -> "Windows" -> "Media Center"

Scroll down to the "StartRecording" task.

You should see that this task is scheduled to start recording at about 5 minutes before the next scheduled recording is supposed to start.

For instance, right now I have a recording that is supposed to record a show that starts at 9pm (I have 15 seconds of initial padding configured so it should actually start recording at 8:59:45). Looking at this task in Task Scheduler, I see that it is scheduled to start at 8:54pm, giving the machine 5 minutes and 45 seconds to do whatever it needs to do before it actually starts recording.

You should see the same on your system, it should be waking the machine about 5 minutes before the next recording is scheduled to start.

[CyberSimian]

So my TV Recording HD spins up as my PC wakes up but it takes ~15s for it to mount.

Is this a USB disk? I have my HTPC set never to spin down inactive disks, but despite that, my Western Digital "MyBook" external USB disks spin down anyway, if not accessed for a few minutes. These USB disks ignore the Windows setting for disk spin down. If this is your situation, I think that you will need to use a different disk to capture TV, and then use a separate process later to copy the recordings to your USB disk for longer-term storage (ROBOCOPY?).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[mercalia]

my windows hd ( 320 GB AV ide drive ) is also where i temp store any recorded shows so no spinup problem. I just made a separate partition for them and the record buffer. if i decide to keep i then use VideoRedo to edit and move to my permanent store hds. no problems. best and simple answer? I dont want my store hds active/spinning if not needed to preserve life & TBs of films

[Space]

I had a problem with a regular SATA disk in that it would park the heads after a certain amount of inactivity. The sound of this really annoyed me and I found out that this was due to an APM setting.

I now use the hdparm tool (http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/) to disable the head parking. I am not sure if it can be used with a USB drive, but I suspect it is APM that is causing the drive to go to sleep (if that is what is happening).

I don't know if there is an easier way to do this, but what I found works, so this is what I am using...

I use this command to disable the head parking on the secondary drive:
C:\Program Files (x86)\hdparm\hdparm -B 250 hdb

hdparm was originally a Linux program, so the syntax may look strange.


You can run it manually from the command line to see if it disables the spindown on your drive. You may have to use values higher than 250 to get it to work on your model (the higher the value, the less power management that is used). There are many other options to control APM on the drive, so you can look up that info if you are interested.

The "hdb" represents the second drive (as opposed to "hda" which is the main boot drive). This may need to be changed to access the correct drive.

Unfortunately (for me at least), this setting was only in effect while the system was awake. Once the system went to sleep and resumed, the setting was gone, so I had to re-execute that command at every resume. I do this with a script I have running that does a bunch of other things as well, but I think you can just have task scheduler do it for you (http://www.sevenforums.com/general-disc ... ost1719428). Just have the task run the hdparm program whenever it resumes from sleep.