Nice little utility I found

[ClassicGMR]

I've been storing movies on an external HDD lately and if I put them in iTunes sourced to that drive it would give me an error when I try to play it. Try again in a few minute and it would work fine. This drove me nuts for the longest time until I figured out (read : Stupid computer tech didn't realize this??) the external HDD (and a lot of internal HDD lately) park to save energy and wear when not accessed.

Embarassingly enough I work on computers and should have known better...

So I hit the interwebs and found a nice, tiny and free TSR program that does the trick. NoSleepHD 2.0

Writes a minute 64 byte text file to the drive at user-defined specified intervals. This has also become extremely useful to me in my GameEx cabinet as well since I can now keep all my files on an external HDD and move it from PC to PC to use without having to buy more hard drives. I now keep one hard back-up, one tower back-up and the external drive. It has been very nice.

Probably not news to most of you but if I've helped one person it's worth it!

[tthurman]

Good find!

I've been playing around doing the same thing with the storage, but reverted back to sneakernet.

[DazzleHP]

This is actually a great find - i've disabled many USB/HDD settings in w7 trying for the same goal, and no matter what i try my external HDD will die and take 3-4 mins to "wake up". This becomes a major pain in ass when you need to restart windows frequently - in fact i often just pull the cable in frustration, thinking " if it dies it dies, i'm sick of waiting"

Thanks for the share CGMR