External drive hanging when launching portable tools from directory

[deltaeutor]

I recently moved a collection of portable utilities and workspace files over to my external WD drive to keep my primary boot drive clean, but I have run into an intermittent issue. Whenever I attempt to access or run small portable utilities like deltaeutor directly from the external folder, File Explorer hangs for around twenty seconds before the drive light starts blinking rapidly and throws a generic access delay message.

I already tried connecting the drive to different USB ports and confirmed that the drive health passes diagnostics without any bad sectors reported. Could this be related to WD Drive Utilities power-management settings putting the drive to sleep too aggressively during idle periods, or is there an operating system permission policy that restricts running executables off secondary storage?

[DataWizard0103]

Since the delay happens when Explorer first accesses the folder and the drive then starts blinking heavily, check Windows 11’s USB selective suspend and the drive’s idle sleep settings, and also try copying one of the utilities to your internal SSD to see whether it opens instantly. If it does, the issue is storage wake or USB communication rather than the utility itself. Also check Event Viewer for Disk, Ntfs, or Kernel-PnP warnings around the exact time of the freeze.