WD Elements - How to prevent it from sleeping?

Hi, I have a 4 TB WD Elements external hard drive which I would like to use to store Dropbox files to. I have been told that if the drive loses connection to my Mac there is a chance that when Dropbox tries to sync files may be deleted.

Is there a way to prevent the external drive from falling to sleep (assuming it does)? If Dropbox is constanlty syncing will the drive be kept awake?

I appreciate this is not completely a WD question but thought you may be able to shed some light.

I’ve turned off ‘Put Hard disks to sleep when possible’ in Energy Saver. Whether this affects external drives I do not know.

Cheers,

Welcome to the Community.

While the WD My Book and WD Passport family drives feature power management and sleep behavior settings, this is not the case for the WD Elements family, and depends on system settings. Perhaps an app can try to read from the drive every X amount of time to keep it awake.

Thanks for your reply Trancer. If as you say the device does not feature any power management would there be a need to have an app to read from the drive every so often?

The device does not feature an application to control the sleep timer, which is factory-enabled in all external WD drives. An app that reads the drive after X amount of time would be an alternative to keep it awake and prevent it from going to sleep. 

See if this works  https://nosleephd.codeplex.com/  I’ve never used it.

Joe

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