↳ Features Wanted & Product Improvement Suggestions.If I didn't fiddle with anything after that, it would work the next time, too. Let me add that the only time that I could be sure that the 150 would recognize that the external hard drive was there was when I successfully recorded for a minute and played it back. I did not like this waste of energy and was afraid that I was wearing out the drive, so I switched to a 500 GB flash drive, which the 150 would recognize. It simply crappy engineering on the part of Mediasonic. The 150 will not wake an idle external drive like your computer will. If I had programmed the external drive to go to sleep after, say, ten minutes and the 150 was set to begin recording an hour later, I would get a 'Disk not found' message on the screen and no recording. I know that the only way that I could get my 150 PVR to recognize that an external disk drive to connected when the time came for it to begin recording a show is for the drive to be in 'active' mode, that is not silent, not asleep. However, one thing that is certain is that it takes more electricity for it to spin than for it to be completely idle. There are conflicting opinions on the Internet about whether it shortens the life of a hard disk drive to let it spin continuously. I wish the 150 could send a message to the hard drive to 'spin up,' however. However, the 150 is not capable of sending any such message to your external hard drive. I think that most contemporary external hard disk drives, except for those that are 'flash memory' like a thumb drive, can be programmed (when connected to your computer) to 'go to sleep' when not in use after a certain number of minutes or never.

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