.Windows 7, by default I believe, turns off (puts to sleep) your HDDs after 20 minutes.
Using Everything awakens sleeping drives.
(Everything is certainly not the only program that awakes sleeping drives, but as I use so much ...)
Is there a way to monitor the sleep state of a drive & if sleeping (optionally) not awaken it.
Gather that the file names themselves are accessible in any case (?), & it is only for the extraneous data (date, size), that it may need to read the drive.
Depending what I'm doing, what I may need to find, I may not have any requirement to access a particular HDD for an extended period of time. Like my music, I keep on its own drive, drive M: as it is. Not doing anything music related, no need to search M: at all, it goes to sleep.
Perform a search for 'prologue', it searches all my awake drives, finding "ChatZilla, the trials & tribulations, prologue.cZ", & it finds (the cached name) of my music files, from drive M: (which is sleeping); "Kitaro - 1982 Millennia - 01 - Prologue.mp3" (& notes "offline", or similar).
Don't know if that's how things work, but if it could work like that, could be beneficial.