Hi, I am looking for a way to force an external hard drive into stand by
mode / turn off / spin down. Any help would be appreciated!

As of right now the only way I can get the external drive to spin down
is to let it reach the time set to turn off the hard drive (via Vista
Power Options) or to turn off the computer.
I can tell when the external drive is spun down since the vibrations
stop. Also the fan does not cause the vibrations as when it is spun down
the air still flows.

System specifications:
OS: Vista x64 Ultimate
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
(6 orange SATA ports are supported by the south bridge chip, Intel
ICH10R | 2 purple SATA ports are supported by the Gigabyte SATA2 chip. I
am not sure of the primary purpose of the 2 purple ports.)
External hard drive enclosu Antec MX-1
External hard drive: WD 1TB Black (WD1001FALS)

1) I originally hard the SATA mode set to IDE, enabled SATA Port0-3
Native Mode and the drivers were from Vista/whatever the
intel_chipset_9.1.0.1012 provided.
On this motherboard there is no "safely remove" function,
similar/exactly like what you normally see with a USB device.
Because of this I opted to use HotSwap!. Unfortunately HotSwap! did not
spin down the drive after safely hot swapping/removing the hard drive.

2) I changed the SATA mode to AHCI while keeping all other bios options
the same. Because I enabled AHCI it is best to use the Intel(R) Matrix
Storage Manager 8.8.0.1009 WHQL (latest version).
Using this method I could finally get the drive recognized upon
powering up the external. (When I used the IDE mode I had to scan for
hardware changes.) However the option to "safely remove" the device
still does not show and HotSwap! still does not spin down the drive.

3) I plugged the external drive SATA cable in to the Gigabyte SATA2
chip supported connectors (purple).
The "safely remove" hardware does show! But the hard drive still does
not spin down when I safely remove it or when I use HotSwap!
I believe it also reduces the drive burst performance, but I cannot be
sure since HD Tune show a decrease to 85 MB/sec burst rate while HD Tach
shows an ungodly 2000+ MB number (which has to be wrong).
(The burst rate is 135 MB/sec in HD Tune when the external is plugged
into the ICH10R ports.)

For all 3 methods the drive does not spin down when I unplug the eSATA
cable before/after hot swapping/safely removing.


--
trikat