I recently received my GPD Win, but it has a problem with the SD card reader: after a short period of time the SD card goes to a “sleep” state and it takes a couple of seconds to wake up.
This really is a problem when playing games (mainly emulator’s ROMS) so, waiting for a real fix, I made a small utility that keeps alive the SD card by just writing a 0 byte file to the SD card every X seconds. By doing this the SD won’t go to sleep. 😉
The utility can be set to autostart with Windows and stays in the tray.
You can download it here.
You can download the source code here.
Have fun! 😉
I have made a batch file (which goes in C:\Windows) and task to be added to the Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) via Action, Import Task. You can get the ZIP archive containing them by going to https://u.teknik.io/S7ZeF.zip. You’ll probably have to change the drive letter in the batch file if the SD Card isn’t showing up with a drive letter of D.
wouldn’t it be better if we create the file once and then only read/access it every 5 seconds?
writing would affect the lifespan of the SD card.
Many thanks for your suggestion, I’ll do some tests hoping that the file isn’t cached by the OS (that would probably make the utility useless). 😉
any other ideas then maybe we could access it low level to keep it alive.
The real fix would be to fix the driver (or the Windows setting responsible of this behaviour).
Btw I tried to write 0 bytes to the file without overwriting it and the SD card doesn’t stay active.