Bad Microdrive?

[coburn_c]

I just bought a refurbished 2.2GB microdrive from newegg.  The first thing I did was copy a movie to play on my 5500, and it worked great.. for about 30 seconds.  It seems that every few seconds the microdrive spins down, the movie pauses, and the drive spins back up.  This happens in all my media players..  Is there something I\'m missing, or is my microdrive hosed?

TIA

SL-5500
OpenZaurus 3.3.6pre1
Transcend 2.2gb microdrive

[tz]

I don\'t think it is hosed - you can try (from the terminal) dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=4096k and see if it stays on through the entire copy.  It probably will.

My suspicion is that the microdrive has a timeout set too short (I think there are hdutils that might fix that) combined with a pathologic case of video rate, so the media player grabs X meg, and needs the next X meg just after the drive has spun down.  You might try running something like \"while true; do touch /mnt/cf/xxx; sync; sleep 1; done\" from the terminal to keep it on and see if the video player stops skipping.

[coburn_c]

After a few hours of sleep it occurred to me it was probably just over-zealous power saving.  I used mplayer -cache 30000 and it works fine and saves some power.  Thanks for the help... Gonna go play with my new microdrive now