External Drive standby problem

[JDM_DSM]

I've developed an issue with seeding torrents from my USB hard drive. Every time I resume the computer from standby I get either "device not ready" or "cannot find the file specified" errors on all the torrents that are on the external drive. If I press resume on these they all happily continue seeding until the next standby.

I'm pretty sure the issue is that the external drive doesn't get recognized fast enough coming out of sleep (it's powered off of a custom adaptor on the computer power supply) and utorrent gives an error.

From the searching I did it seems like a lot of people have this issue whenever a usb drive is briefly disconnected for some reason.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? It seems to me that if there was an option to attempt auto-resume a torrent after an error this fix this right up.

Another option would be if there was some way to delay utorrent from re-starting torrents coming out of sleep.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[paintball9]

You are correct about the harddrive taking longer to spin up, (usually about 10-15 seconds on external drives)

Your best option is to just pause or stop your torrents before putting your system to sleep, and resuming when you wake it up. The other option is just disabling the standby/sleep option or setting a much longer time on it.

Also you should know that when sleeping a system external drives like that tend to get kicked off the system rather suddenly instead of properly unmounted. It's possible you can lose data when a drive loses power suddenly like that, Ejecting the drive properly can save a lot of trouble in the long run.

The problem with having utorrent try to delay the resuming is that the applications don't even know they've been slept, thats how the function works so smoothly, it just pauses all current threads in the cpu and keeps the ram refreshed so it can continue right where it left off as if nothing happened, same with hibernation except that its written to hd for longer periods of time.

Another thing you might want to think about is tracker stats, I've never looked very close at it, but you might lose all the stats since the last update when sleeping like that, because when you do wake up again the tracker think's you've just been disconnected and might reject the update values as being false.

[JDM_DSM]

This computer is hooked up to my TV as a media centre computer. I generally just use a media remote to control it, and have MediaPortal running all the time on it, so stopping all the torrents before sleep would be a pain, as would not using standby (don't really want to do a cold boot every time I want to watch TV).

So I guess the solution would be to have a setting for utorrent to attempt to resume torrents with errors. Something like "retry once every minute for 5 minutes" or something.

[paintball9]

That would probably fix it yet, but what I meant with not using standby was not to just turn it off and require a cold boot but instead to just leave the system running. I mean the longer the system runs the faster you get the torrents seeded and or downloaded as well. Just leave it on, tell it not to go to sleep after a set amount of time.

Also if you have utorrent resume without user intervention on errors then who knows what could be happening. it might actually be doing damage by continuing. It usually stops as a precaution to avoid destroying data. We wouldn't really want the developers blamed if something got overwritten would we?

[JDM_DSM]

I don't really want to leave this computer running constantly.

I don't know much about how hard drives work, but if uTorrent doesn't see a drive that data is stored on, could it not just make a couple attempts to see if it shows up before giving up? Is that something that could corrupt data?