Like many others I primarily bought aTV Flash to add an external drive and for me it is working fine.
I have one question though, the drive ( a bus powered 250Gb disk ) does not seem to spin down at all. Am I doing anything wrong ?
I’m loathe to leave the disk running all the time as I normally leave my Apple TV on standby overnight but the external drive never stops spinning.
Thanks
Hippo
Hello Hippo,
I have an external USB drive too and mine spins down after a period of inactivity so I wonder if it’s your drive that’s at fault not the ATV.
Have you checked that the drive is designed to spin down.
It does depend on the drive. Some will spin down, others will not.
This is encouraging. 
I know the internal drive spins when in standby, and had assumed that an external drive (when set to primary) would suffer the same fate. Can anyone recommend a decent 1TB USB desktop drive that is known to spin down with the ATV?
I’m using Western Digital My Book 2TB. Had no issues with it and it spins down when it’s not used for about 20 minutes I think.
The only thing I did have to do was disable the silly automounted disk with the disk management software on when I first got it. A simple task that’s documented on the WD website but annoying nonetheless.
I’m also using a couple of Iomega drives that have worked fine and spin down but I’ve never connected them to the ATV so can’t tell you if they would when connected to ATV.
Thanks for the answers all.
I think it must be the disk - I used a bus powered USB drive and it’s not man enough for the job anyway. Playback stutters a bit so I am planning to use different drive at some point.
Back on the internal for the time being.
Hippo