如何在 Windows XP 中禁用外部 USB 硬盘驱动器上的自动睡眠

Question

I've seen a related question on this website regarding a Linux system. I have the same question on a Windows XP OS. I bought a Winchester USB external HD, and found out from technical support that the sleep feature is in the firmware and cannot be turned off. I'm looking for an application that will automatically read/write to that drive periodically to keep that timer resetting (every 5 minutes?). Is anyone aware of a small application for Windows XP that will do that?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I have tried nearly everything to fix this problem on my external which is shared out containing my movies. Nothing ever worked. I have a WD Mybook, and I think the sleep is occurring internally in the drive.

I have a solution that works for me, and should for anyone else. The key is to keep the USB drive doing something. Not a lot, but something simple, causes some type of change on the drive.

Windows XP does not have a SLEEP command, but you can download one and add it to the SYSTEM32 folder. Then all you need to do is make a simple batch file, and put it in your startup folder so it executes when you log in.

Make sure you have write access to the drive. Change the drive letter to yours...

Make a batch file.

:start
@echo off
@cls
@echo Keeping USB Drive Awake.  Do not close this window!
@sleep 60
@dir E: /S /B >E:\keepawake.txt
@echo Drive Accessed %date% at %time% >keepawake.txt
goto start

This will write the full directory structure to a file on the E: drive in a file called keepawake.txt. Then it will overwrite it with a simple note containing the date and time. This will always be different. It will do it every 60 seconds.

Problem solved...

-Krehator

Answer 2

I'm using the free/open source Windows program KeepAliveHD ( http://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/ ) to accomplish this. Works well.

Answer 3

Make batch (.BAT) file something like this:

@echo off
:start
copy c:\windows\notepad.exe g:\  (Or whatever your external drive is)
choice /N /D Y /T 120            (The 120 is the delay in seconds)
goto :start

Answer 4

You could try NoSleepHD.

http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/

It writes an empty text file to your chosen drive every few minutes (you can choose the minutes) to stop the drive going to auto-sleep mode.

google: nosleephd

Ashx

Answer 5

Any text editor with an autosave function would do it. You could also write a batch file to get a directory listing, and have it act recursively (call itself) after a set time period. Or use windows scheduler to execute it.

Answer 6

use this batch file change the 1st two lines letter t: to your drive letter. it works in all versions of windows

@echo off:start

REM --- Change the drive letter below to match your HDDs. To add another drive replicate the copy and del lines --- copy NUL t:\HDDActive.txt del t:\HDDActive.txt

TIMEOUT /T 30 /NOBREAK goto start