Black Raven Dragoons

[Zancarius]

I finally hit the last straw this weekend with the Thermaltake enclosure I got a couple of months ago. As it turns out, some of the SATA enclosures you can buy on the market (especially from Newegg) have power management features you cannot disable. Disabling power management on each of the USB root devices in Windows doesn't work. Disabling power management period doesn't work. In fact, nothing short of a chipset without this--err--feature will work. There is nothing you can do to stop the disk from turning itself off.

Well, maybe not.

I wrote a small script to do the work for me, but it was getting to be a real pain having to remember to click on the stupid thing every time I plugged in the drive. I do have a solution, however.

I wrote an application this weekend (download here) that does all the work for you. In fact, it installs as a Windows service and runs in the background without any indication it's there. Laziness is a virtue. You can also read a little bit more about it here, including the system requirements. (Spoiler: You need the .NET framework 3.5 or higher).

So, if you have an external enclosure that goes to sleep from time to time and you're tearing your hair out trying to figure out how to stop it, I've got you covered. The application is only about 300KiB. (Well, assuming you have that pesky .NET thing--most people do.)

Updates: It appears that the Windows Management Instrumentation that I used to query devices cause some significant disk access about every 3-4 seconds on Vista-based machines (including Windows 7). The exceedingly ironic part is that Windows XP systems are unaffected and behave normally. I will attempt to resolve this issue next weekend. You will be able to see the issue by monitoring the WmiPrvSE.exe process on affected systems.