I have an issue of my WD MyBook Live Duo going into some kind of low power standby mode when it hasn't been accessed for awhile. When I try accessing the drive it takes a minute or two to become responsive. When this happens Windows Explorer says the drive is unavailable. If I'm accessing the drive regularly throughout the day then this issue doesn't occur.
Does anyone know of a way to make the drive more readily accessible on demand?
As you pointed out, the WD My Book Live Duo is a NAS, not an external drive and OS settings won't affect the way it works. Going to Settings, System and then Energy Saver should give you the option to enable or disable the Sleep function on the HDD. Do you notice any difference when this option is checked or not?
You can also check this thread for more info.
1) Go to the "System" settings pane in the Administrative website for the device
2) Expand the "Energy Saver" section
3) Uncheck "Hard Disk Sleep"
This will prevent the hard drives within the WD MyBook Live Duo from going to low power sleep mode, and will make the drive more readily accessible.
Note: I have tried this in the past with this particular drive and it did not work. There have been a couple firmware updates since then (it's been a couple years) and now it appears to work properly. Also worth noting that this may decrease the lifetime of your drives within the device.
Open Control Panel, Power Options. On the left choose, Change when my Computer Sleeps. It has an option for powering down the drive.
