Latency accessing external hard drives with my Win11 Omen desktop

[Steverinho]

I bought my OMEN Desktop recently (within 2 months) and from the beginning I have found there to be an intermittent latency when performing operations that access external hard drives.  I use external hard drives extensively for music, mostly.  Whether I am trying to play an audio file using File Explorer or opening or editing a file using Adobe Audition or simply playing a song in iTunes, there is often a few second hesitation when nothing happens and then, the operation will begin.  It is extremely frustrating.  Not something I was expecting for the money I spent on this machine.

[banhien]

@Steverinho 

Normal external USB drive can sleep when not active therefore it will wake up and that time can delay few seconds for ready access. How many external drives on your machine ? On my machine, the access time could be 5 seconds or more. My machine connects to many devices and it take more time to access  I can hear the disk spins. Machine accesses mt network drive quciker because it spins the time.

          

Hope this makes sense.

Regards.

[Steverinho]

Thank you for the response, Banhien.  Prior to this computer, I had an Acer Intel Core i7 6700 with the same setup of external drives.  The hesitations I described above probably did occur on occasion with that computer but not at the frequency that they are now with the Omen.  The Omen has an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G processor.  Here is a screen shot of the drives plugged in via USB.  (The BATMAN one is a flash drive.)

[Steverinho · Accepted solution]

Banhien, although I did not get the answer directly from your response, you sent me on the right path.  I did look into the period of time before the drive will go to sleep and it turns out that for some reason they were set to 1 minute.  I changed that to 10 mins and it seems to have solved the problem.  Thank you.