Do all external hard-drives have lengthly spin-up times after periods of inactivity?

M

Mateo1041

New Member
Hi all,

I have three external hard-drives:

* 3-year old Seagate (250 GB)
* 1-year old SimpleTech (250 GB)
* New Western Digital (750 GB)

Both the Seagate and WD have really lengthy spin-up times. If I'm not actively using the hard-drive, it generally takes 7 seconds or so to spin up so that I can use it again. What's worse is that it does it even when I'm just clearing the Recycle Bin.

My SimpleTech does just fine and never has any wait whatsoever. I'm bummed because the entire reason for me purchasing the WD was to avoid the lengthy spin-up time of the older Seagate.

1) Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reduce spin-up time?

2) Why do some hard-drives do this and others not?

3) How do I know if an external hard-drive does this before I buy it?

It's just really frustrating.

Thanks,
- Matt
 
it's to save power, external hard drives weren't meant to have operating system stuff and programs installed on them.

you know that it should do it because it's an external hard drive, buy an internal hard drive next time.
 
I use a laptop and only store data files on all three drives. All applications and OS files reside on my local laptop.
 
To follow up, creating my own external hard-drive with an enclosure was suggested in another forum. That's a good idea too. I ended up purchasing a Maxtor as I found their Maxtor Manager software enables me to disable sleep mode. So I'm now good to go. For anyone interested, Seagate and Maxtor are basically one and the same and Seagate also now offers this same software.
 
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