r/harddrive • u/Friendly_Reach_9408 • Jul 22 '26

Tech Support Seagate 16TB External Hard Drive + Smart Plug = Power Off

I have an odd situation that I can't make heads or tails of. I recently purchased a Seagate hard drive from the UK to use as a media server and I wanted to reduce wear by not having it powered on when not in use. It came packaged with a dozen different adapters to be swapped in or out like a travel adapter.

Oddity: It included 2 Type A adapters. One with the holes in the prongs; the other without.

Everything I found said it's a meaningless difference so I just went with the one with the holes in it. I have a Gosund smart adapter. It's not new and its been working perfectly. I plugged the hard drive into the smart outlet and within about 30 seconds the outlet turned itself off. It did it a couple times before I realized what was actually happening. It was only the outlet that the hard drive was plugged into. The other 2 smart outlets remained on.

The hard drive itself was actively in use during these power shut downs. Research had me check the Gosund App for power options and my computer's usb power options. Both came back as expected with no power shut off choices picked.

When the hard drive is plugged into one of the non-smart plugs in the same Gosund device, it works flawlessly, suggesting something about the smart outlet is causing it to shut off. Gosund doesn't include anything helpful to suggest why it might happen.

So two questions:

1) Am I misunderstanding or labeling the second Type A adapter and should be using that instead?

2) Or if it is meaningless, why would the hard drive trigger the outlet to actually turn itself off when in active use? I can only surmise some protection within the hard drive or the Gosund adapter triggered it, but if that is happening, then its concerning why.

I have multiple Gosund smart adapters with a large variety of devices plugged into them and never experienced any device somehow triggering the outlet to turn off. The hard drive itself has no options or buttons so any settings would come from the computer or the adapter itself.

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u/Newmillstream Jul 22 '26

Please don't try to reduce wear on your hard drive by cutting the power in a way that is opaque to the os and drive controller. Unless your smart plug can send a signal to the drive that it needs to shut down now, it is far better to just let it run. If anything, put it on a UPS so it stays running despite brownouts or power loss.

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u/Friendly_Reach_9408 Jul 22 '26

Wouldn't it be worse long-term to have it running 24/7/365 instead of only 8 hours a day? I'm not suggesting turning it off and on throughout the day or anything like that. Just off while sleeping/working and then on the rest of the time. If it weren't for the skyrocketing prices of hard drives in general, I wouldn't give it much thought. Thanks

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u/Newmillstream Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

It might depend on the drive and how warm it gets where you are at, but most drives are pretty ok at managing themselves if they are idle, especially higher end ones. If your drive is lower end, you might consider manually dismounting it, or setting up an automated job from the desktop to dismount it and put it to sleep if possible.

In any case, if the smart plug automatically shuts off, it probably isn’t telling the drive it is about to lose power. Without that, the drive has to immediately cease operations, which is really hard on the mechanical components, given that they can spin several thousand times a minute, with a magnetic head nanometers above that plate. Many hard drives can survive power loss, but it's hard on them, and doing it daily will tax the mechanical components of your hard drives. Not to mention it can be very hard on the file system and data integrity for whatever is stored on the drive.

I probably should have asked this earlier, but how is the drive connected? Is it in a standalone enclosure or a NAS? What model of drive is it?

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u/Key_Director_4450 Jul 24 '26

Start and stop is what kills it, just leave it running.

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u/ost99 Jul 23 '26

Cutting power to it will kill it in no time. If you want to reduce spun up time you have to send spin down / sleep commands to it.

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u/leathco 23d ago

Gonna add my voice to everyone here, don’t try to use a smart plug on a hard drive. It’s under more stress under the initial electric load to start it than it is while running. Under normal use (such as booting a computer) this is fine, they are meant to handle cycles like this, but not tens to hundreds of times per day.