Tool/Fix for users with "sleepy" External Hard Drives (Win/Mac)

From Ssl-wiki

See post: [1]

It has been reported that users of Maxtor drives may already have a feature included with their EHD's drivers which may allow for modyfication of the "sleep" setting. Seagate users and some Western Digital users have reported that their drive has the "sleep" feature and cannot be changed.

SSL user "nobspangle" provides us with a simple solution to those who use drives with special power management features meant to put the drive to "sleep" after a few minutes without data requests. Some users may find that this embedded feature of some drives (intentionally created to lenghthen the life of the drive by reducing wear, heat, and power consumption) can become a problem in applications where the drive is in demand suddenly.

In SSL if you are playing a long song for example, the drive may begin the "awakening" process while you try to load a new track and things will seem to either freeze on the screen or you will just notice that nothing actually loads onto the virtual deck.

This waiting/loading period can be easily avoided now thanks to this easy tip courtesy of several scratchlive.net contributors. The script provided will simply create a single text file on a folder you specify inside your external drive at designated intervals that you can change to any value you desire. This will maintain your external drive awake until you either terminate the process from the Windows Task Manager or turn off your external drive. Please note that by-passing the external drive's power management feature could cause a drive failure or other problems over the long term, if you have any questions contact your drive manufacturer.

Open notepad and paste the following into it:

DIM fso, File

Do While 1>0

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Set File = fso.CreateTextFile("E:\empty.txt", True)

File.Close

WScript.Sleep 250000

Loop

Find the line: Set File = fso.CreateTextFile("E:\empty.txt", True)

Now replace the E:\ with the letter for your external drive.

Choose file->Save As Save the file to the desktop, call it "RunHardDrive.vbs"

Now double click the file on the desktop, it will run in the background, you should see it on the process list as wscript.exe if you open task manager. Every 250 seconds the script will create a file called empty.txt on the harddrive, based on WScript.Sleep 250000, you may change this number if you feel its necessary, most drives go to sleep in between 5 - 15 minutes of innactivity.

Thanks again to Sam, nobspangle, nik39 and the rest of the forum members that contributed.

Written and quoted by DJ BIS.