Automatic spin-up of an external disk

[Slanec]

Not a feature request, not bug - I am just curious about the technical background

External discs tend to shut down after a while under Windows. When I switch to that disc in Salamander, the last path is cached and instantly accesible. When I try to access anything, the disc has to spin-up and that, of course, causes a one second lag. It's annoying, but it's a less than minor problem and I am not certain whether it could be solved.

Is it technically possible to make it spin-up on the access of the cached path (by refreshing contents of the panel) ... on the background?

[therube]

I would think that either you wouldn't want your drives to go to sleep, or that you would want them to not awaken - inadvertently.

You could always extend the sleep timeout period so that the drive would be less likely to sleep during "usage".


On my slow & overtaxed computer & with an external USB HDD attached, awakening from sleep takes well more then 1 second all the while impacting machine responsiveness (the little that there is ).

(It has always been my theory that lots of sleep/awaken cycles are bad for a HDD.)


Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

[Ether]

Although it does probably affect the validity of your request, I have to agree with therube and say I'd very much like not to wake up my drives and Salamander is mostly helping (but Windows is constantly ruining my efforts).