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.