External HDD: how-to stay active

raventalons

New Member
I have a neat system with multiple external HDD's. I have a SSD for my OS and another for running games. The externals are used for storage and running media. I used to just run everything from an external, but bottlenecking and the like was just awful, so now I have multiple drives.

ANYWAY, I have this problem with my media external "turning off" or at least becoming inactive. An example is if I'm playing an episode of DW and I pause it for a short period of time and then resume it, the player waits nearly thirty seconds and then waits an additional thirty seconds for the sound to catch up. It's crazy annoying.

I've already gone to the power options in the control panal to try and make it so the harddrive never turns off there, but it didn't help. Suggestions?
 
Did the hard drive come with software on it? I know when I got my seagate goflex it had software on it and to make sure it didn't go to sleep I had to install and go into the options on their software and turn off that feature. It's not in the power options of your control panel but rather the options in the software actually on the drive.
 
USB devices have their own power management settings, did you change those or HD power settings? Also, some external hard drives might spin down by themselves if inactive for long enough regardless of operating system settings; if that's the case with your drive, there isn't much you can do.
 
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