Modern hard disks are set to automatically enter sleep mode (also known as idle time) whenever file operations are no longer happening. This is a method that is supposed to help with cooling the physical disk and prolonging its lifespan. However, if you wish to prevent this from happening, for example if you want the disk to quickly respond to file operations even after remaining idle for long periods of time, then you can tinker with the built-in settings of your machine to turn off HDD sleep mode. If you find this method to be tedious, though, then you can turn to software utilities capable of keeping the HDD or SSD awake by creating small-sized files just to be able to mimic user interaction. Such a program is Vovsoft Prevent Disk Sleep.
Designed with the casual user in mind, this program is incredibly simple to use. It can be scheduled to create a plain text document (TXT) in any disk of your choice, whether it's local or external USB drive. After a speedy installation that requires minimal intervention, the tool opens a plain window which shows all options available. Once you identify the disks you wish to prevent from sleeping, it's necessary to pick the matching drive letters from a menu, set the disk write interval (in seconds, minimum is 10 seconds), edit the name of the TXT file that will be created, as well as click the 'Start' button.
Vovsoft Prevent Disk Sleep creates the text document with the given name. It's placed inside the specified folder in the selected disk, so it shouldn't be difficult to track down. The application doesn't create multiple files each time it writes to the disk. Instead, it updates the one document by adding date and time stamps. This is also helpful for logging its activity and finding out the exact time of each disk write. Whenever you want to disable the software, simply stop the operation after returning to the main app window. Using this utility ensures that your HDD gets no sleep, keeping it active and responsive at all times.
Category: System Utilities 
File & Disk Management
Supports: 
Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP (32-bit & 64-bit)
Language: English, Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
License: Freeware — no nags, no ads, fully functional
Prevent Disk Sleep Frequently Asked Questions Difference between Installer and Portable Editions Vovsoft Portable Software List Prevent Disk Sleep Feature Requests
Your wonderful software utility, “Prevent Disk Sleep” saved my life!!!! My external hard drive had been going to sleep and waking up constantly, annoying me no end, but with your software everything is now fantastic!!!! Thanks so much!!!! Your Big Fan
— Bob Mandel
Thanks for your Prevent Disk Sleep utility, it’s exactly what I was looking for - my disk went to sleep after only 20 seconds of not being used, which resulted in e.g. impossibility of playing MP3, because there were pauses in the middle of songs. While other similar utilities could write a file to the disk in minute intervals (which was useless for me), your utility made it possible to set intervals in seconds - perfect! Thank you!
— Jan Flaska
Exactly what I was looking for!
I bought a new USB3 HDD dock and it has a “wonderful” feature where it automatically sleeps the HDD after 10 minutes. This feature is not optional and many docks seems to be doing this these days.
Constantly braking and spinning up a hard drive is bad for them, so I needed a solution.
This wonderful little program is just the ticket.
I set it to write it’s little file every 8 minutes and the problem is solved!
Many thanks to the creator for this.
— James Cree
Simplicity and Excellent.
I have been looking for something to keep my external drives awake for ages. Vovsoft provides a simple application that does just this and it works great. Immediately sent them a small payment to show my appreciation.
Life at my computer with my many computer hobbies and many external drives is literally 100% improved.
— Dan 
Prevent Disk Sleep is a beautifully simple and unintrusive utility that does exactly what it says. It’s been a lifesaver for me trying to use an external hard drive with an Avid editing system. Thank you
— Anonymous User
Thank you so much for this wonderful App. My 10 tb drive went to sleep after every 2 mins. It was driving me crazy. I nearly threw it out of the window several times but this has finally solved that problem so thanks again and keep up the great work :)
— Anonymous User
External hard drive going to sleep and causing audio dropouts, after leaving system idle. Computerized audio synthesis stores data in ram, once that is no longer sufficient, it seeks out more data out on a designated data drive and needs the data instantly. If the drive is sleeping, there is an audio dropout. Just hitting the start button in this app solves the problem. It wakes up the drive and you’re ready to play! The user can then just close the app, or stop the app, so the music apps have all the system resources. Thank You!
— Anonymous User
Thanks for this Prevent Disk Sleep! I had been running a scheduled backup program to a secondary HDD on my PC. This backup program couldn’t write to the HDD because it would be asleep at the required time and would cause serious problems with my PC as a result. Sometimes the backup would simply fail and other times, more seriously, the OS would freeze up and was unable to shut down or reboot. The only way to get it operating again was to boot from an emergency disc and reinstall the OS from the backup. Extremely irritating and time consuming to say the least. Since using Prevent Disk Sleep I have not experienced any more of the mentioned problems and no problems at all with the program itself, which runs continuously in the background 24/7. Thanks again, my friends.
— Anonymous User
It saved my life! I am a video editor and a lot of time the sleeping disk was killing my time by freezing the whole program. Now nothing happens and i am very grateful! HDD is always ready to do the work i want! Thank you.
— C. P.
Thanks! Great and necessary thing. Especially when you have Windows 10.
— Fominator
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Copy Files Into Multiple Folders 
Hide Files 
Keystroke Visualizer 
PDF Reader 
Prevent Computer Sleep 
Text Edit Plus 
Installer
Portable