I have my BB modem/router mounted in the loft, to which I have no quick
easy access. On those rare occaisions I do desire to turn it off, I
have a remote control wireless 13A switch.

The router has a USB socket on it, which supports a 1Tb USB HDD. It
works and I have access to the HDD anywhere on my network, but I would
like to be able to not have it running all of the time. I could add a
second remote 13A switch, but might there be some way to have the HDD
start and stop itself from running only when accessed?

It is an older 1Tb USB Buffalo HDD..

In article ,
Harry Bloomfield writes:
I have my BB modem/router mounted in the loft, to which I have no quick
easy access. On those rare occaisions I do desire to turn it off, I
have a remote control wireless 13A switch.

The router has a USB socket on it, which supports a 1Tb USB HDD. It
works and I have access to the HDD anywhere on my network, but I would
like to be able to not have it running all of the time. I could add a
second remote 13A switch, but might there be some way to have the HDD
start and stop itself from running only when accessed?

It is an older 1Tb USB Buffalo HDD..

All drives can be told to spin down/up using commands over the bus
connection, but it will depend on your router's management and
filesystem if it gives you access to such features. The other thing
that many drives can be configured to do is to spin down after a
period of inactivity, but again, you need some management software
to configure this.

Spinning disks up and down does cost significant disk life. You
don't want to be doing this too often if you want the disk drive
to last. It might save you a few watts, but for a single drive,
that's going to be a saving of less than £5/year, for potentially
much shorter disk life (depending how often you do it).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Andrew Gabriel submitted this idea :
All drives can be told to spin down/up using commands over the bus
connection, but it will depend on your router's management and
filesystem if it gives you access to such features. The other thing
that many drives can be configured to do is to spin down after a
period of inactivity, but again, you need some management software
to configure this.

Thanks, have you a link to any software which might support this
please?

It will not be run up and down often, likely less than once per week.

On Thursday, 5 January 2017 19:32:45 UTC, Harry Bloomfield wrote:
I have my BB modem/router mounted in the loft, to which I have no quick
easy access. On those rare occaisions I do desire to turn it off, I
have a remote control wireless 13A switch.

The router has a USB socket on it, which supports a 1Tb USB HDD. It
works and I have access to the HDD anywhere on my network, but I would
like to be able to not have it running all of the time. I could add a
second remote 13A switch, but might there be some way to have the HDD
start and stop itself from running only when accessed?

It is an older 1Tb USB Buffalo HDD..

Does it not spin down a minute or two after you unmount it?

Get one of these.

http://swldxer.co.uk/ssd.jpg

wrote on 06/01/2017 :
Does it not spin down a minute or two after you unmount it?

It would be permanently plugged into the router, but no I have no I
have not heard it spin up and down other than when its wallwart is
plugged in. It is silent when running, but quite loud at spin up and
down.