The Slippery Soapbox

by **Fogdude** » Nov Sat 18, 2017 1:55 pm

Some of you may have external USB drives, like I do. I have several 8TB drives hanging off one machine where I do most of my archiving. I also have 4TB drives on most other machines. Somewhere in the past year, apparently due to a Windows 10 update, Windows started ignoring all system settings regarding the sleep status of external drives. I had every setting available set to never sleep, yet my external USB drives started going into sleep mode after a few minutes of last access. Thus meant that the next time I used any program that needed to bring up a file explorer window, so I could save a file, had to tap the drive & wait for it to wake up. This could take several seconds for each drive. This became extremely tedious. I checked everything repeatedly, rebooted, updated everything I could think of & still the drives would go into sleep mode.

Finally, I googled the right phrase & found a utility that fixes the problem, though it's a brute force solution. MicroSoft refuses to acknowledge the problem at all & insists the settings are incorrect, but when you follow all their advice, you end up in a worse condition, with most of the settings reverted back to default, making all your devices sleep on a set interval. They seem to believe this is desirable & necessary & have no plans to change it.

So, the solution I found is what I'm using & it works. If you've encountered this problem & want a fix, look up KeepAliveHD. It's a small program that runs in the background & writes an empty file to drives you specify, then, optionally, deletes the file. You can set the write interval to whatever you like. It defaults to 7 seconds, but most systems would probably work at 9 or 10 minutes. It just depends on your settings & your hardware.

There are other programs like this out there, but the other one I tried is possibly malware, since it installs itself into a hidden startup registry location & no matter what you do to disable it, keeps reinstalling itself. I had to run CCleaner to get rid of it, though erasing the executable did work, it kept inserting itself into my startup list & then failing. I won't name it as I don't want to send you to it by mistake.

If you need it, get KeepAliveHD. I've been using it on two machines for over a week with no ill effect & it has cleared up the drive lag when accessing them.

by **Wrench** » Nov Sat 18, 2017 2:27 pm

Thanks Foggy but don't have that issue with Windows 7 and I don't leave my externals docked all the time. I will keep in mind that software if I do ever need it.

by **VincentLupo** » Nov Sat 18, 2017 8:24 pm

I do a similar thing with python scripts at work. I also have one that makes the machine think the mouse is moving to keep the machines from logging off automatically. Stupid IT and there security protocols. Always having to subvert them.

by **Fogdude** » Nov Sat 18, 2017 8:27 pm

VincentLupo wrote:I do a similar thing with python scripts at work. I also have one that makes the machine think the mouse is moving to keep the machines from logging off automatically. Stupid IT and there security protocols. Always having to subvert them.

Yeah, I found a mouse wiggler proggy, too, but I've never had a problem with that. At least they're still abiding by those settings, so my machines never sleep.