Modern hard drives have this annoying power saving feature of spinning down when disk is not in use for a couple of minutes. This often results in a few seconds pause when accessing files, game freezing until disk spins up and so on.

To fix it, first thing you wanna check is a setting Turn off hard disk after in advanced power options (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Advanced power settings

Make sure it is set to 0. After saving settings, give it a go – if it helps, then great, problem solved. However usually this is not enough, because modern HDD’s have hardware level power saving features which ignore this Windows setting. My go-to tool to prevent drives from sleeping is CrystalDiskInfo (just get Standard edition). Upon installing it, select Function -> Advanced Feature -> AAM/APM Control from top bar menu, select your hard drive(s) and click on Disable under Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) and Advanced Power Management (APM) sections (if applicable) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 AAM/APM Control

Then check option Function -> Advanced Feature  -> Auto AAM/APM Adapation. Lastly check Function -> Startup to make CrystalDiskInfo run on Windows logon (Fig. 3).

Fig 3. Menu