Soved with hardware usb 1.0 card, thanks everyone for your help.

[pdq1234]

I am curious and wondering if you have done a best of three. if it appears to time out is the time consistent, you say it does this on large files so if you have three different.... also if you have a couple of live cd you could test on other systems to see if it does the same. may help to pin it to something via time or if it is vector specific. perhaps you have done this, was just a thought while reading.

Yes it seems to be exactly the same amount of time.

It times out(shuts off is the effect, drive disapears from system it will come back, I'm guessing this is from rescan of USB by Linux?) if setting, times out if reading, but seems to stay while writing but times out after write is over.

These things have the same bugs on windows.

[pdq1234]

I am curious and wondering if you have done a best of three. if it appears to time out is the time consistent, you say it does this on large files so if you have three different.... also if you have a couple of live cd you could test on other systems to see if it does the same. may help to pin it to something via time or if it is vector specific. perhaps you have done this, was just a thought while reading.

This is a common problem with some USB drives. If you do a search, you'll see it's not limited to a specific distribution. The drive itself is responsible for letting the OS know it's time to go to sleep.

Yep, I found an old driver(combo of drivers) to fix windows, a few years ago. I'm sure Linux will work, its just finding the commands or package I need.

There is a command you can send to the hard drive its self to set the drive not to time out but I have no idea what it is or how you would send in in Linux and it doesn't save when the drive is powered off it will go back to default.

I'm wondering if there is just some way to set the time Linux will wait for the drive to restart and if that would even work right?

I'll keep looking and thanks everyone for your help.

[pdq1234]

I just found this link on Google but have no idea if it has the info I need or not, but it may give someone an idea who knows more about Linux.
http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/power-management.txt

I see others have taken actions to work around the problem see his post towards the end of this page.     http://ask.metafilter.com/36580/Why-wont-my-USB-hard-drive-stay-mounted-without-constant-disk-access

However this does not seem a viable work around to me, as it would seem to cause problems with reading and writing to the usb hard drive with this cron thing writing this little file in the middle of say copying a big file off the drive, etc. I would think it was also torture on the drive writing all the time.

I know there have to be lots of people using these critters and someone has to know the right way to fix this?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[bigpaws]

There is one common denominator. The I/O magic case.

That is where there is more than likely firmware that is
making these drives suspend. The newer drives also have
spin down set on the hard drives. Which is what some of the
posts were trying to get at.

This may get you somewhere:

http://sobell.com/mgsblog/archives/5

DISCLAIMER:
I skimmed the information and I have used these commands before.
However that does not reduce the risk of loosing data. Only use
on a drive where the data can be lost.

HTH

Bigpaws

[overthere]

del

[pdq1234]

There is one common denominator. The I/O magic case.

That is where there is more than likely firmware that is
making these drives suspend. The newer drives also have
spin down set on the hard drives. Which is what some of the
posts were trying to get at.

This may get you somewhere:

http://sobell.com/mgsblog/archives/5

DISCLAIMER:
I skimmed the information and I have used these commands before.
However that does not reduce the risk of loosing data. Only use
on a drive where the data can be lost.

HTH

Bigpaws

The drives themselves(WD green and Hitachi green) have a spindown feature and will spindown to save power when not accessed after a set time all by themselves on any interface, SATA in a machine or on the USB SATA enclosure, they will then restart when they are accessed again.  

Thanks for the link as far as I can tell(So far I don't know much about Linux, in the future I hope to change that, but at the moment I need help to get things working.), I think that link you gave me has the info needed to get this working as long as someone can tell me the exact way to enter this,  
"With an argument of 0 (zero), the –S option prevents the drive from entering low-power mode and spinning down. The numeric arguments cause the drive to spin down after a specified period of inactivity. An argument in the range of 1-240 causes the drive to spin down after nx5 seconds (120 causes the drive to spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity). An argument in the range 241-251 cause the drive to spin down after (n-240)x30 minutes. These values may vary between drive manufacturers." ,
As you see it doesn't explain how to setup the command for the terminal(Almost all the commands had examples but this one.     ), as far as I can tell it would be something like "sudo hdparm -s /dev/sdf  ? ? ?" ware the ? ? ? bit is the numeric argument? but I could not find an example of how to do it.  

I searched and found this link which has all the hdparm entries
http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/man/index.php?s=8&n=hdparm
but it has no example of how to enter the -S command either.
(On a personal note, I wonder why the programmer created parameters for hdparm in both upper and lower case letters that do different things?   This seems real scary to me, in that simply putting in the wrong case could screw up your hard drives data.)

If someone could help me out and show me the exact commands to use to shut off the spindown all together I would be most great full.  

Also how would I make this permanent so the drive is always set so it doesn't spindown.  

I only have the USB drive on when I'm reading or writing to it anyway, as I figure the less a hard drive runs the longer it will last.

Anyway thanks for the help.

[bigpaws]

Sudo is not setup on Vector Linux.

Open a terminal and then use su
and enter root password.

Then issue the hdparm command:

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb

That will turn off spin down on the drive. Please note to change to the
appropriate drive.

Linux is case sensitive. Cost and cost are not the same thing.
The reason for switches to be upper and lower case is that it adds
another 26 letters to use before needing to do something else.

HTH

Bigpaws

[pdq1234]

Sudo is not setup on Vector Linux.

Open a terminal and then use su
and enter root password.

Then issue the hdparm command:

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb

That will turn off spin down on the drive. Please note to change to the
appropriate drive.

Linux is case sensitive. Cost and cost are not the same thing.
The reason for switches to be upper and lower case is that it adds
another 26 letters to use before needing to do something else.

HTH

Bigpaws

That didn't work, I tried another option I found it didn't work either.

Then for some reason my addled mind thought of something I should have tried long before this, I had an old dual port USB 1.x pci card.  I put it in the computer disabled the motherboards USB 2.0 ports fired up vector and wala it worked the first try.   No shut down or well no disconnect anyway, its slower than hell but the drive stays active on the system and you can let it sit for a long while, copy a huge file, play a video, and everything works fine, well almost, you can't play an hd movie off the USB but on USB 1.x I don't really figure it should. 

I'll order me a couple of those cheapo $1.30 Chinese usb 2.x cards and away we go.   This is more of an experiment anyway.  I have a faster computer I was using on Linux but it developed a intermittent problem after a storm.   I think the power supply is messed up, the old boxes power supply is too small to run the newer motherboard or I would have just swapped out the power supply.  I was out of luck till I got a new power supply.   So I was left with the old beast as the only thing I had laying around to play with Linux on.  I figured I'd see if I could find a distro that works on the old Duron, Lubuntu didn't, it was so slow as to be unusable.  I was gona try Xubuntu but when the the download of the ISO was gona take over 5 hours I decided to look around some more.  I saw a site saying Vector Linux was good on old boxes.  I downed a copy and it works quit well.   Actually its about as fast as Ubuntu was on the faster box which has 3 times the clock speed, twice as much ram, and a much faster video card.

Anyway, Thanks everyone for your help.