501 not spinning down HD again

Originally posted by renardg
My 501 has been acting strange again and not spinning down the HD even though it has been turned off the entire evening.

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Is the 501 supposed to turn off the HD periodically? My 721's HD runs 24 hours/day, regardless of the state of the power switch, which seems to be a waste of drive life to me!

- Bill

Is the 501 supposed to turn off the HD periodically?

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Sure. The 1st thing I see when I power up my 501 is a little message, "Please wait while the hard drive spins up." Takes about a second.

I don't have any experience with the 721 yet but I'd be suprised if it was supposed to spin 24/7. If you power it off I should think it would spin down after a minute or two but you would hear it spin up at some point to update the EPG info. :shrug:

Are you sure it's not just the fan you are hearing?

Mine takes a good 30minutes unil it stops spining after powering down. Awful noisy at one point during the after noon but it seems fine now. This thing can't die yet, there are still no 508's around here

Originally posted by HTguy
Are you sure it's not just the fan you are hearing?

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Actually, it could be. Is there an easy way to tell?

Not having a PVR721 to listen to I can't say. But Big D seems to know the difference here:
721 fan Thread

Maybe he or Scott can tell us.

Yes, you can very diffidently tell the difference between when both the fan and the hard drive running and just the hard drive, it is about 20 plus dB difference. I have only caught my 721's fan cycled off a couple of times, but when it did, it was like being in the kitchen and the refrigerator compressor shutting off, it is a big difference. I had to walk up to the unit and put my ear to it to hear that the hard drive was still spinning when the fan was off, but with the fan on, I can hear it from 30 feet away! It seems like the hard drive never spins down, at least mine never has, even after the unit has been turned off for 10 hours.

Does your 501's fan ever cycle off or is it a 24/7 on like the 8VSB module is.

I thought my 721 was always either running the fan or the HD or both. But today (I powered off the receiver with the remote last night about 16 hours ago.), after reading this thread, I went to check the unit which has not been turned on for at least 16 hours, and there is absolutely no sound coming from it all. And no vibration. The front left side is quite warm however. So I guess that it does totally power down some of the time??

I have caught my 721 with the fan cycling off for short periods of time, but never have I seen the HD spun down. How long before the HD spun up again? Did it stay off till you turned the unit back on or did it spin up on it's own?

My bug is that the "Please wait will the hard drive spins up" message never goes away. It has been doing this a lot lately.

It requires a power button reset to remedy the situation.

Another BUG and it has only done this 3 times in a year...the coax output will stop working once in a while. I'll still get signal out the S-Video, though. Its odd. All the other connections in the house are passive (and only one splitter that Dish installed) so it really does seem like it originates from the 501.

-todd