Firewire drive slow at first?

[DAG]

I have a Western Digital Firewire MyBook Premium. When I go into Windows Explorer and click on the drive letter there is a 4-5 second delay, but after that delay the drive is very fast until I stop using it for a while and have to go through the process again.

What's causing that bit of latency? I don't have this problem at all on my USB hard drive (or any other hard drive on my system).

I don't know if this is relevant, but the drive is plugged into the firewire port on my sound card (Sound Blaster Audigy2)....however I once attached my friend's camera to that firewire port with no initial latency problem that I can remember.

Drive came as FAT32 but I reformatted (using quick format) to NTFS when I got it.

thanks

 

[jcortes]

the drive most likley has a standby feature and it just takes a bit to start up when you havent used it and it is in standby kind of like when a cd drive goes to rest and you open my computer and try to click the cd drive it has to spin up. same concept.

 

[DAG]

is there a standard windows way to turn that off? or it's some annoying driver thing?

 

[bmxfreakrider]

no thats common, its pretty much a usb harddrive, its off when you dont kneed it, then when you want it, it takes time to spin up, i think thats preset with the drive, but the software that came with it might be able to change the settings

 

[DAG]

because this takes longer than my usb hard drive does...that one has almost no lag time at all...this is an annoying 5 seconds or so

and one other thing i don't like about the western digital my book, is this stupid circular blue light...wtf is that...i don't need to see visually how much of the drive is being used up, just give me a little led so i know when the thing is working...when the light in this room is off, it just glows obnoxiously like a night light

 

[jcortes]

see if there is a feature in the drivers or something or a fix on the internet to disable both the standby, which i think is what this is, and the annoying blue light.