Anybody have any luck with low-end media drives?

I am currently storing my media on a WD My Passport pocket drive but am frustrated by its limited capacity (4TB) as well as its tendancy to power down after a short period of non-use, causing a delay of a few seconds while it starts up again.

Would a cheap drive such as the WD Easystore or the Seagate Backup Plus Hub be any better?

Thanks.

I'm no fan of massive drives. The performance is often limited and when they fail as they will you lose so much.

I prefer lots of smaller drives. 

Any recommendations? I really find the delay while the drive winds back up annoying. Any way around it?

Are you on Mac (what your specs say) or on Windows (the forum you chose)? If on Mac, I suppose you already unchecked "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" in the energy preferences? If so, there is a tiny app called "Keep drive spinning". It does what its name says. Maybe have a look at that? There was an update for Catalina. But I don't know whether it still works in newer versions of MacOS.

I've recently gotten rid of the old 27" Imac workhorse.

I'm on a PC now--gotta update my specs! It's a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus laptop with an additional 32" monitor. Running Windows 11 and MC 2021.12. My system drive is an SSD.

Any tweaks you can suggest to keep the external drives spinning? Or is a hardware issue, and if so, are there other drives that don't have this problem?

Here's how I've set my Power Options in settings: "When plugged in put my device to sleep: NEVER"

Not too familiar with Win anymore. So hopefully someone else chimes in to help. Until then, have you already googled something like „Windows 11 prevent hard hisk from going to sleep“? From what I know the setting you mentioned affects your computer as a whole, not the drives in particular. Advanced power settings seems to be what you are looking for. If you already found and changed those settings to no avail: there seem to be apps like the one I mentioned for Windows as well.

Also USB controllers have power saving sleep options. Check those aren't enabled. 

The PC version to keep a drive spinning is called KeepAliveHD.

Another thing to check is in the Computer Management app -  Device Manager - Disk Drives. Right click the drive in question and under Policies choose Better Performance. I find that this can help too - alghough this option means you have to properly remove the drive and not just pull it from the computer

Please note that if you turn on Better Performance, this enables write caching for the drive in question. In essence this disables immediate flush of the cache to the hard drive, so if your system loses power you will lose the content of the cache. That will result in a corrupted file.

In order to safely remove a drive with Better Performance enabled, you have to manually eject the drive before removing it. You can do this from the File Explorer by right-clicking on the drive and selecting Eject, or by going to the task bar, and in the notification section on the right choose Safely Eject Hardware (this looks like a little flash drive, and it may be hidden unless you press the ^ symbol).