External harddrive case to spin-down drive when idle

I try to make external 2.5 hard drives automatically spin down when idle and connected to android devices. The device I have got in mind is a HDMI TV-Stick with USB connector. I tried a few cases/harddrives and found only one old 3.5 case which will spin down the drive when a .nomedia file is present on the drive to prevent indexing. Are there general differences between external drives which can influence their ability to spin down idle drives? Also I would be grateful for hints to android software which can trigger the spin-down and for explanation which requirements to make this work exist in general (for software, disk and case).