Got a tired drive that just won’t stay awake? Then you may find my new (open source) utility, Drive Caffeine, useful.

Drive Caffeine sits quietly in the system tray and pings any selected drives at the interval you specify, to keep them awake (it just writes a file to the disk and deletes it again). Simple as that!

“But you can just set the drive to not sleep!”. In many cases this is true, but if you have one of these newfangled external “eco” drives that enforce naptime after a short interval at a hardware level then this can lead to frustration, lost productivity, and even hairloss.

I’m always happy for any feedback, good or bad (especially bad) so feel free to tell me what you think of it.

There are some circumstances that will break it at the moment. It doesn’t know about drives disconnected while it’s running. If you don’t have write permissions to the root of said drive then you will also get an error. I’ll fix these in future.