I've noticed that when using some applications like Miranda, my application window will pause as the system pages the HD on my mp3 player.
Are there any utilities or programs that disable HD's from sleeping?
I'm sure I won't have this problem with a solid-state solution, but what are my options as an HD user? I've read about Ram Disks, but how does that work?
Thanks in advance
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I am not aware of any software to bypass the sleep routines built into most battery-powered HD devices. I would suspect any that are out there would be hardware-specific. Remember, the intent of the MP3 maker is to maximize the time playing music, not to keep the energy-consuming hard drive running. A recommendation would be to use a separate USB-powered HD for your portable apps.
Thanks for your input, it gives me something to think about.
One thing I should have said was that this MP3 player draws power from it's host, so there's no concern over sparing battery power here, and I'm using my mp3 player on a desktop.
The issue I'm having, specifically, is that the hard drive spins down, and then needs to be woken up again if an application I'm running needs to cache data. When this happens my application freezes until the hard drive in my mp3 player wakes up. I watch movies on it, and listen to mp3s a lot, so I'm not weary of any extra HD spinning.
What I'm going to do now is test running a small flash application in the background which streams a 2 frame flv file, which *should* keep my drive spinning until I terminate the program. I imagine using this this "spinning" program for an hour at a time, if not less, so I'm going to assume the only drawback is the inevitable death of my HD which noone can prevent.
Ideas?
Less is more
Alright, I had some time to fiddle with my mp3 player in the hopes of finding a loop I could force to keep my drive from going to sleep.
I tried playing back a media file, streaming an swf, streaming an flv, and dynamically loading jpg files from a flash movie. The results were always the same, XP caches files locally thus breaking my "loop" on the mp3 player's drive and handling it in ram or on the C drive.
I decided to go a little more basic and just have a bat file write a blank line to a text file ever few seconds.
echo. > %path999%
echo press q to cancel.
choice /c1q /t:1,2 /n
if errorlevel 2 goto done
if errorlevel 1 goto loopy
That's the code if anyone is interested. I set %regpath% to the document path, but you can just call the file relatively.
Tested this loop for an hour and a half, and my mp3 player never got warm, or made any crunchy noises during that time. I reckon this is a simple fix for anyone else who may experience this problem.
*Edit*
I just played an 45 minute online match of Warcraft III off my mp3 player. I did not experience any pausing during that time thanks to the loop running in the background. After the match I checked my drive and it was still the same temperature before playing.
Less is more