Why does DVD spin up when reading an HDD file?

[ICEBreaker]

Dear computer performance junkies,

I had actually wrote a long diatribe about this issue, but rewrote it in favour of a short and light hearted discussion. It's simply this: Why does accessing a simple TXT file residing on a SSD take several seconds, while waiting for every HDD (including external ones) to slowly power up.

Not only does this waste time but when something goes wrong with one of the hard disks (say an unreliable USB connection to an external HDD), the whole system is badly affected.

Note: This issue has been around since the dawn of the computer age, and exist across every platform/OS. Accessing any file require every hardware to be polled first. If any are idle/sleeping, it takes ages to power up.

Thanks for your opinions.

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[BrianBaughn]

You sound like you know why the programmers built this into virtually every OS.

Perhaps it won't be as clunky when all our drives are solid state.