External Drive Issues

I'm not even certain this is a Windows 10 problem, but wanted to get an opinion here anyway. Here is the situation and what I've tried:
I have an external WDC WD80EMAZ-00WJTA0 8 TB drive (WD Elements) that’s about 2 years old. If it hasn’t been used in a while, when I click on the icon in file explorer, it may take about 15-20 seconds to open while Windows 10 says “working on it”. Once it does initialize, files can then be quickly accessed as expected. Other times, it opens immediately so no pattern. Things I have tried include disabling windows search (indexing), clearing cache in file explorer, disabling USB suspend in the Power Plan settings, unchecking “allow computer to turn off USB devices to save power” in power management in device manager (USB root hub), tried a new premium cable and a different known good power supply, tried all USB 3 ports on the rear of the PC, Crystal Disk Info reports no errors nor does WD Diagnostic Tools. CHKDSK reports no errors. Some of the folders on the drive do contain large amounts of data (one folder is over 50GBs full of pictures). The drive is barely a third full so nowhere near full capacity. I do have a setting enabled in the BIOS to shut off USB ports when the PC shuts down so that external devices won’t stay on after shutdown so I don't have to manually turn off the PC via the power supply. Nevertheless, I can’t see why the drive wouldn’t initialize on startup and be ready to instantly open at all times, not just some of the time. At least one other person on another forum said their large external drive also takes about the same amount of time to initialize if not used for a while (hour or so). Any ideas or things I might have overlooked? I have posted this to the WD community an got no responses. Drive has been optimized and is 0% fragmented. No errors found using Windows 10 tools. Before I buy a new external drive, is it possibly still a Windows 10 software issue I might have overlooked? I guess I can overlook the random 15-20 initialize time, but it can be annoying if I'm in a hurry. I'm running Windows 10 Pro 21H1 19043.1288.

When my WD external HDD (My Passport Essential) had been left idle for almost 20 minutes, the disk stopped spinning. It spun up again when I read files on it. That had nothing to do with Windows as per the following thread:

Is that a built-in function on the HDD or Windows 10?

nitewulf said:

I guess I can overlook the random 15-20 initialize time, but it can be annoying if I'm in a hurry.

Consider using Task Scheduler to run a script that will access the disk at intervals.

Thanks guys for the replies. I'll contact WD later today and see if they know of any known issues.

It might just be that this is expected performance vs. an actual issue. Running a script to occasionally access the drive might be an idea.

Hi

Your issue is with what causes this lag at initialization, this take 1 second normally.

For the script to work it must write to the disk.

I use a chronometer to get how (xx) time it takes before falling asleep.

Then schedule a task that run a cmd that goes like this.

Code:

Md e:\!StayAwake!
Rd e:\!StayAwake!

Every (xx-3) minutes

A CMD script will bring up a CMD window.
VBScript will not bring up a window, as it runs in the background.

You can use the option when creating the task. And it will run in background.

Hi Denis,

You are right. it's my brain that's not...

To run the cmd hidden, use



I should have said...

Problem solved. It apparently is a well-known Windows 10 problem as evidenced in this thread:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...?auth=1&page=1

I tried every single suggestion in that thread and nothing worked until I installed KeepAliveHD from this source:
GitHub - stsrki/KeepAliveHD: Prevent hard-drives from going into sleep mode.

It does the same thing some of you guys suggested: writing a small file to the external hard drive at an interval you select. I chose every 7 minutes and also to run at startup. So far, problem solved. I'll update if anything changes.