I have all my digital media on a 2TB USB hard drive (w/the essential stuff backed up), and I use this drive to serve data to my Boxee Box. The only problem is that this drive seems to be set to spin down after about 5 minutes with no accessing. This makes starting a video on Boxee very slow, and what's even more annoying is that if I pause a video for 4-6 minutes (for people to use the restroom or get snacks), when I start playing it again, Boxee waits for the video for about 5 seconds before it quits back out to the video selection screen.

Part of this is Boxee's fault. It should be more graceful in handling these delays. I had the same problem with my WDTV and it would just wait until the video came.

Anyway, I was hoping that someone might know how I can control my USB hard drive a little more. I remember there used to be a setting in Windows that let me choose how long the system should wait before letting individual hard disks spin down. Was I dreaming that? Where did it go?

At the moment, when I know we're going to watch a good deal of stuff on Boxee, I've been playing a video from the drive on my computer on repeat to make sure the disk is always in use. I'd much rather tell the drive to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity. Can I do that? Or does it have to be an internal drive?