External Hard Drive Wake UP times?


  1. Posts : 91
    windows 11 64 bit h22
       #1

    External Hard Drive Wake UP times?


    I was hoping when I purchased my new laptop computer with my 3.0 USB ports that it would make a difference in the speed of the Wakeup times for the external drives. No such luck.

    Every time I access either external USB after a period of time I click on the External Hard Drive Icon and it may take 30-40 seconds before it "wakes up". I have seen an option in the Power setting for HDD to never go to sleep but I have tried that previously and it still did not change the behavior of the EXTERNAL HDD. The power setting option AFAIK is only for the internal HDD not the external. Is that an internal program set up by the external HDD company to prevent the external power supply from burning out to soon?

    Tonight I noticed a text script program that writes information in different time intervals to the External HDD that prevents the drive from powering down or never going to sleep. Would this hurt my external hard drive?
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 9,753
    Mac OS Catalina
       #2

    Why would you wear down a drive just because the enclosure it is in does not respond quick enough. Get a NAS for your network or connected Cloud account to store data that can be accessed on the instant.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 7,607
    Windows 10 Home 20H2
       #3

    jcloversX said:
    Tonight I noticed a text script program that writes information in different time intervals to the External HDD that prevents the drive from powering down or never going to sleep. Would this hurt my external hard drive?
    Such a script will by no means be detrimental to an HDD. However, if it never sleeps, its life could be shortened.
    I use scripts every day.
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 2,800
    Windows 7 Pro
       #4

    In reality Disks that are always spinning wears a lot slower than those doing start / stop. Bearings expansion / contraction at each time it heats up / cool down, this is the major cause of degradation also some line of disk have a limited load / unload life span and will break sooner because of this than spinning all the time. I use a Home server and the disk almost never stops and is still 100% after nearly 8 years.

    External Hard Drive Wake UP times?-screenshot00003.jpg
      My Computers


  5. Posts : 2,111
    Windows 11 Pro (latest update ... forever anal)
       #5

    Been using KeepAliveHD on 3 x 8TB HDDs for over 6 years now.

    Negligible impact, but if any, much preferred for the convenience of having an active disk ready at the click of a mouse.
      My Computers


  6. Posts : 7,607
    Windows 10 Home 20H2
       #6

    jcloversX said:
    it may take 30-40 seconds before it "wakes up".
    I put my USB HDD into sleep and then ran the following command to wake it up:

    Measure-Command {Echo "Hello">"O:\Testing.tmp"}|Select TotalSeconds
    Code:
    PS C:\Users\Matthew_Wai> Measure-Command {Echo "Hello">"O:\Testing.txt"}|Select TotalSeconds
    
    TotalSeconds
    ------------
       2.3546154
    It took 2.3546154 seconds as shown above.
    Can you run the command and post the output?
    Right-click on the Start button --> Windows PowerShell, from which the command can be run.
    Remember to replace O with the actual drive letter of your HDD.
      My Computer


 

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