I wrote this little Windows Forms application a while back as an answer to a small issue I was having with my external hard drives.  I wanted to prevent them from spinning down and entering a sleep mode after a certain period of time.  This application simply attempts to write a text file to the root of each configured drive in order to keep activity on the drive and prevent it from spinning down.  I wanted to learn how to do some of the different configurations but mainly wanted to write a working Windows application.  Tested in Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

It is fully customizable to allow for multiple hard drives, and has different configuration settings such as how often (in minutes) to write a file, minimize to tray on start, monitor automatically on start, and run on Windows start up.  Once a configuration is saved, settings are saved even if the application is restarted.  I wanted to take a look at some of these basic configurations that can be reused across other applications that I build.

Below is an EXE of the application and the full source in case you are interested in checking it out!

HardDriveNoSleepV1.0-EXE.zip (91.46 kb)
HardDriveNoSleepV1.0-SRC.zip (422.66 kb)