How in the Tech

Stop your external hard drive for going to sleep

By Adam Myers ⋅ September 9, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Annoyances, Windows

Have you ever opened a new Windows Explorer session that would partially hang for 15 seconds before displaying any contents? Often times this is a result of your power management settings having your hard drive power down after a few minutes of inactivity. Fans of the environment certainly appreciate your efforts to limit energy waste but it’s user experiences like the one above that prevents everyone from adopting that mantra.

Putting your hard drives to sleep isn’t just limited to the internal drives but it also can be extended to any of your external USB/eSATA/Firewire drives – drives that have become quite commonplace on desks across the world. Power settings are configured and adjusted within Control Panel, as most are aware. Annoyingly enough, many external drives do not respect the applied settings and instead, power down at their own fancy. Certain manufacturers have this setting hard-coded into the hard drive’s firmware; unchangeable by the end-user. So what if you want to prevent this behavior anyways? The secret is to keep the drives from becoming idle.

XSleep is a free windows download that can manage power settings on up to four external hard drives by simulating activity which in turn, prevents the drives from spinning down. It’s quite the low frills application but that suits it’s overall responsibility quite well.

If you are feeling a tad guilty about your power consumption yet still want to use XSleep I’d be obliged to tell you the software has a built-in scheduler which can disable it’s functionality after office hours.