ShieldTV: Powering down external drives

by shatheid

I have a ShieldTV with two drives attached to it (one external, one portable). I don't like having them on all the time, as sometimes it'll be a day or two between uses.

So, a few questions/thoughts:

1.) Is there any way to power down USB ports through software? This is the ideal way, as it would turn off both drives.

2.) What about timed/smart power strips? Even just having them shut down at night would save a lot of hours with them running. However, would it be hard on the drives to just "pull the plug" so to speak. This would only help with the external drive.

3.) If there is a way to power them down, how about waking them up?

Ideally these things would happen automatically, without me needing to get a separate surge protector and flipping the switch, or yanking the portable drive out; not to mention the hassle of going through the menus to demount the portable drive.

Let me know what you guys do. Open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks!

stak640

You can completely power off the SHIELD from remote, but then you gotta hit the touch button on the front of the console to power on again, no way around that. Unless, you use the smart powerstrip. I used one before, worked fine; but I didn't like waiting for the boxes to boot up every time I turned on the TV - so I stopped having it cut power to them.

When in sleep mode it (external USB attached drive) will always stay on as the SHIELD is still on too, just in a low power state. Get a NAS and with the next SHIELD update - you could have the SHIELD use the NAS for storage and the NAS should just power down on its own.

andrewthecoder

No useful suggestions I'm afraid, though I'm sure if you root your shield there will be an app in the play store or on xda or something which will let you do this. However, what purpose are you hoping to achieve here? If you're worried about putting unnecessary strain on the hard drives, it's actually better to keep them spinning than to power on/off regularly so you may be best just leaving them.

3r0z

I'm no expert but in my experience it's better to leave an external drive running than to keep stopping and starting it. Then again I use mine everyday and if I'm going out of town or something for a few days I'll power down everything. But I don't think stopping and starting it everyday can be good for the life of drive.

JimboLodisC

I still think it's pointless.