NoSleepHD Stops External Hard Drives From Shutting Down

/>Windows only: Tiny utility NoSleepHD stops external hard drives from powering down, bypassing the mandatory sleep mode built into many USB drives—and eliminating the delay while the drive powers back up. Using the utility just requires launching, selecting an external hard drive, and starting NoSleep mode—which writes to a file every minute so the drive never has a chance to power down, eliminating the delay when accessing files on the drive. This application does the exact opposite of getting green with your computer, but could come in handy if your home media server has issues dealing with the drives shutting down. NoSleepHD is free and open source, works for Windows only. Readers using Linux could simply create a cron job that writes to a file to keep the drive awake.