--- for lack of a better description...

I've got my old work computers working pretty good for the most part, not too much to complain about. My 8.1 is the newest 'work computer' I have, the only reason I rebuilt IT is because at least for a little while I can run TurboTax on it. And with 'Classic Shell' other than the actual working windows it looks and acts like any win7.

I have several multi-TB external drives, one is a portable Sandisk SSD 2tb that I store ALL of my jobs on, and plug it into ONE computer, where it becomes a network drive for all the other computers. It's BEEN connected to my newest win7 computer, and has been working wonderfully. I have (had) another 2tb 'my book' connected to the same computer, working great. However, the ONLY computer I have with high speed USB ports is the Win8. So last weekend I got the bright idea of moving these drives to the Win8's high speed ports. WOW-! I was able to copy my entire 20 year old Corel jobs catalog to my 5tb drive (connected to my router) in about 8 minutes. This used to take near an hour to do!

So what's the problem? IF the Win8 computer is 'idle' for like 1, maybe 2 minutes, then ALL its drives, even accessing them from itself, takes several seconds- like 8 to 30 on average-! , for any files or folders to show up. Once they show up, the drives work great. But after a minute or so wait before accessing a drive, and the wait-for-files-to-show-up BS happens.

This did NOT, and DOES not happen with ANY other computer in the house, by wireless, ethernet or directly.

It seems like the drives are going to sleep, but I really don't know WHAT the problem is. The only thing I've done to try to fix the problem is make the computer NEVER turns off the drives, display, etc, and set it for "max performance" in the advanced settings...