Hard Drives Take Time to "Wake Up"

[Mojavemojo]

I have 3 internal hard drives (2x SSD, 1x mechanical) and 2 external hard drives (connected via USB 3.0) and when they've been inactive for a while, it takes several seconds to bring them back on line, which is very annoying, especially when I'm in a hurry. This is happening to both internal and external drives although I have my Power Settings > Hard Disk - "Turn off hard disk after" set to "Never" and the USB Selective Suspend Setting" is disabled. So why is this happening and what can I do about it? I'm using Windows 7 x64.

Hope someone can help.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there.

I'd say that this is normal for mechanical drives. They do inter an idle/sleep state whenever they're not used for some time (depends on how this is set in their firmware). The extra couple of seconds is due to the fact that mechanical drives need to spin-up, before you're able to access them, unlike NAND flash memory devices, such as flash drives and SSDs.
Basically you could try looking for a tool which might be able to keep your drives "awake" or alter the time they need to go into idle mode, but you should do that at your own discretion as I don't think that's officially supported by any of the drive manufacturers.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Mojavemojo]

That never happened with the internal hard drives (both mechanical) on my old computer though; when I clicked on a folder to open it, it opened immediately. Now I have to wait maybe 7-8 seconds before anything happens.

 

[EQula73]

That never happened with the internal hard drives (both mechanical) on my old computer though; when I clicked on a folder to open it, it opened immediately. Now I have to wait maybe 7-8 seconds before anything happens.

This is happened to me when I installed SSD as system primary HDD? before was opening immediately !