DriveAlive 1.2

[MilesAhead]

I recently got a couple of USB 3.0 docking stations.  They work well but they have an idle time-out to spin the drives down that's not adjustable afaict.

I wrote a small AutoIt3 program to sit in the tray to keep the drives alive.  It's useful in situations when you know there may be a lag before some program you are using outputs to the drive and you want to avoid the drive spinning down, only to spin back up again a minute or so later.

The way it works is simple.  Through the shortcut Target line or via the command line, you specify drive letters, with colon, for the drives to keep alive(e.g. DriveAlive x: y: z: etc..)  It does this by creating an empty file named drive_alive_dummy.txt in the root of each drive, and overwriting it every 5 minutes.

The Tray Icon Tooltip shows the drives currently being kept alive.
Select Exit from the Tray Icon Menu to kill the program.

Running DriveAlive with no params shows a usage dialog.

Note that DriveAlive does not support UNC pathnames.
To use it with a mapped network drive, make sure you
have file creation/modification privileges on the share.

The dummy file on each drive is deleted on program exit.
DriveAlive does not create any Registry settings or .ini files.

The latest version is currently available for download:
http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html

[MilesAhead]

DriveAlive 1.1  Removed error message caused by launching a 2nd instance of the program.  Now the 2nd instance is just closed without popping up an error dialog.

[sajman99]

I don't have need for such a tool with my current hardware config, but DriveAlive certainly sounds like a useful software.

Bookmarked for future reference.

[MilesAhead]

I don't have need for such a tool with my current hardware config, but DriveAlive certainly sounds like a useful software.

Bookmarked for future reference.

-sajman99 (April 12, 2010, 04:16 PM)

Thanks.  It's been great not to have to wait for drives to spin up when opening an explorer window or mapping a network drive.  I'm doing a video conversion right now, reading from one dock and writing to the other.  Just nice not to have to worry about drives spinning down during a lull.  I think I searched for the manufacturer's utility longer than it took me to write it.  Nice and simple.

[MilesAhead]

DriveAlive 1.2

As of this version it's implemented in AHK.  Now you don't have to kill the instance in the Tray to change params.  Just run again with new command line params.  If there's already a copy running in the Tray, it will be replaced by the new one.

Also as a result the memory footprint is a bit smaller.
A Donate command has been added to the Tray Menu.

The latest is now available on my site.  Softpedia should update in a day or so.

One note, to cut down on file i/o the dummy file is created if it does not exist, deleted if it does, and cleaned off on program exit.  I mention it in case anyone notices the dummy file disappear although the program is still running.  It's "working as designed" as they say.