Help with Hard Drive Stand By / Turn Off / Spin Down

I have an external drive and am trying to force it into standby mode or turn off or spin down. There is only one way that i can get the external drive to spin down by letting it to reach the time set to turn off the hard drive with the help of Vista Power Options or by turning off the whole computer. When the vibration stops then i can notice tha the hard drive has spin down. Now can anyone tell me some other ways that i can perform to do such things? Thanks

I havent seen any external hard drive which can be powered down with the help of the power management features in the operating system. I have only checked that there are some feature of some newer external hard drives like from Western Digital, but all those also mention that the feature is only available with the help of USB2 or Firewire connections and not ESATA.

You can try to disable the drive and then enable it again whenever you want, for the follow the below method:

1. First click on Start and then right click Computer and then select Manage.
2. After that you have to select Device Manager and then right click on External USB device
3. After that just select disable.
4. Incase if you want to enable it then choose enable back again.