I just moved from a MOCK to a ROCK NUC on the approved list.
I have my library copied to a USB HDD, a WD Elements iirc, attached to the NUC, and that is where ROCK is pointed to fetch the music.
I still find with the new NUC that the external HDD goes to sleep, and Roon takes a while to wake it up at the beginning of a listening session. Is there any known settings tweak I could apply to overcome this rather minor issue?
It’s possible. I’m not a ROCK user but I get the impression that this kind of tinkering might be problematic.
Thank you, but as you say, problematic as apart from me not knowing what I’m doing, any alterations get wiped every time ROCK updates as I understand it.
I’ve been meaning to do this myself for ages with a WD Passport drive. As far as I understand it, at least with the the Passport drives, power saving can be disabled with WD Drive Utilities. My plan is to shut down ROCK, plug the drive into the Windows box, tweak the settings and then plug it back into the ROCK box. Perhaps this approach might work for you?
Thank you, yes that seems potentially more practical.
I will have a look on the WD site to see if I can download the software. Elements models come with fewer utilities than other models in the WD range, but I always delete everything on receipt anyway as it just seems like bloatware.
This could be the exception which proves the rule 
I just had a quick look, and it appears that WD have no such utility for Elements models, only My Book models, so I think I’m just going to have to live with slow starts, or using Windows Explorer to access the drive beforehand to wake it up.
Definitely a first world problem anyway!
Ah, sorry for misleading you on this!
A slightly expensive way to solve the annoyance might be an external SSD? That’ll do away with spin up times but if you want more than a TB it gets pricey quickly.
No problem. It was a good idea.
Sadly that would be a quick route to penury, as the library needs an 8 TB disk 
I had a moment’s temptation though, but fortunately it seems they don’t exist quite yet as a commercial product 
Samsung are releasing an 8TB 2.5" SSD for £900 “soon”. The downside is they’re using the bargain basement NAND implementation. That comes with a 3 year warranty only. Big money, little guarantee…
I can wait 
I am mostly posting to keep this thread alive.
I would be happy to have a setting that spins up the drive(s) when I launch or when using any client app. The assumption should be that I would like to make use of the library if I interact with the apps. It could then allow drive to go to sleep if there has been no usage so the amount of extra time the drives will be spinning will be negligible but my wait times before music would be reduced quite a bit (and when I least want to wait).
Ha ha, I did in fact give in late last year and get a new NUC for ROCK with the Samsung 8TB SSD installed in it to hold my library. It did immediately solve the problem, albeit at a considerable cost.
It has behave impeccably from day 1, and I hope I am not tempting fate by saying that.