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Whenever I open a homegroup folder on another computer on my network, and the remote harddrive has to spin up, windows explorer seems to lock up until the remote request completes.

This affects other connections such as spotify. Why is this? Is there anyway of stopping this, other than disabling the power saving options?

In addition, are the life span benefits of spinning down HDDs, when not in use, more significant than the spin up operation?

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In ye olde days I might call this a hardware interrupt situation where the system pauses (hangs) waiting for a hardware response. Not sure if this happens anymore in windows 7 – horatio Feb 2 '11 at 21:19
If the hard drive is a green Western Digital, you're SOL anyway, because it has firmware inside to do aggressive power saving. Worth a look. – Randolph West Feb 3 '11 at 0:45
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Good question. I find that Windows Explorer will lock up for both laggy network locations and CD/DVD drives. It has always bugged me - surely proper threading can easily prevent this degradation to the user experience? – sblair May 8 '11 at 1:24
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Under Power Options / Change plan settings/Change advanced power settings in Control Panel you can disable this feature by entering 0 for Never.

enter image description here

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I understand and accept the lag, but I was asking can I stop the lag affecting other applications that steam over the network? Was also asking if its worth while powering down the hard drives or not. Sorry if I wasn't clear – Kurru Feb 2 '11 at 20:58
I don't know why I stop reading at "stopping this". Sorry. I'm afraid that i don't have a answer for this other than some kind of cache anticipating future reads like an hybrid hdd. Cheers. – andySF Feb 2 '11 at 21:20
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