$ crontab -e  # this pulls up the crontab file editor to which you append:
 
*/4 * * * * ls  /media/drive-you-want-alive

The */4 is equivalent to 0-59/4.

A couple advantage that I’d say my solution has is that it doesn’t require you to go futzing around with the crontab file, which on some systems you won’t have access to, and also, if the root of that drive is huge doing an ls on it can be a really big deal, way more of a deal than just touching an empty file. If that’s the case you could basically do hdactive in cron:

*/4 * * * * touch /media/drive-you-want-alive/.hdactive

And since hdactive requires significantly more setup and is therefore way more confusing than crontab, if you’ve got access to it, it’s probably the way to go.

I don’t have this problem myself, but doesn’t `ls` keep the drive spun up? I don’t like creating unnecessary files on the hard-drive, but if you don’t then – if you use `touch` – you have to change the modification date of some other file on the drive. So `ls` seems preferable, unless the o/s is caching the directory listing.

Also, I wouldn’t tend to run the script manually – that way you have to remember to do so every time you reboot your computer. I would omit the `sleep` so that it runs to completion & doesn’t hang around in the background. Then just add it to crontab so that it is automagically run every 4 minutes; I believe this is the crontab syntax:
0-59/4 * * * * ./hdactive.sh

any chance of this script working for me?

How might I go about it (I’m not a programmer, but I know my way around a PC)

Cheers for any help
-Ferand