Network shares & lags

Good day mighty experts,


I do have a question regarding the way Windows 7 handles network shares. I have a few NAS servers on my network (mapped to local drives on my pc), some of which using power saving techniques. As a result, they stop their hard drives after a few minutes idle time. This is fine, but I do experience sever lags on my desktop unfortunately.

Whenever I open the file explorer, right click the taskbar, perform any system task, launch an application, etc, the system (explorer.exe) freezes for 15-20s until the NAS hard drives get powered on. I am not even browsing these drives or using any data out of them - merely performing local tasks or trying to.

When it happens 20 times a day, this behaviour gets highly annoying. Is there anything I can do to tell Windows not to scan the whole network or refresh the whole network neighborhood when I simply want to open a local file?


Thanks!

In so far as I know there is no way to remediate this behavior. It it simply resource enumeration (smb/netbios) and since some of the resources that the machine is attempting to identify and confirm their availabilty are network based and because of a power saving setting are unavailable this will add time to the process. My suggestion would be to adapt the power saving scheme for the problem resources since a network relies heavily on high availability and up-time.
There is one other very subtle issue with Windows 7 and certain network shares, most noticeably printers, but I don't suspect that that is actually your problem but if you would like to research it further then google seems to mostly impact network shared printers.