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HD Active

Prevent external HD's from becoming inactive (sleeping).

About

The functionality of this project, as stated above, is to prevent external mechanical Hard Drives from sleeping and avoid waiting for them to spin up when accessing.

The objectives of this project, however are the following:

  • Learn some QT basics for UI development in Python.
  • Use MkDocs and the theme MkDocs-Material for documentation.
  • Use PyInvoke for misc tasks in lieu of the more widely used Makefile.
    This has the following advantages: * Avoid the use of a different language for scripting. * Scripts are OS independent by using Python instead of an OS specific language like bash. * Scripts are easier to create and maintain (because Python 😃). * Other functionality that PyInvoke provides.
  • CI with GitHub Actions.

Quick start

python -m app.hd_active --conf app/hd_active.ini

Config file

The file hd_active.ini, located in the same folder as the app, is used to persist settings.

The file is created/updated when settings change.

Options:

  • run_on_start: Whether HD Active should start pinging drives when it runs. If False, the user needs to click Start.
  • wait_between_access: Time, in seconds, to wait between drive pings. If too long, the drives may go to sleep, if too short, drives will be pinged unnecessarily, although this is not a big issue.
  • drives: Which drives to ping. This is a comma separated list and doesn't need to have quotes, ex: e,f,g or e:\, f:\, g:\.

Sample: 

[HD Active]
run_on_start = True
wait_between_access = 30
drives = e:\, f:\, g:\