Refresh panels in background

[m^2]

Some moderately annoying problem:
I have an external drive that spins down it's platters when not in use. Touching the tab with it in any way makes TC stall for like 2 seconds, even if I'm just Ctrl+Tabbing to another one.
Yes, I know I could avoid it by asking TC not to refresh automatically. But this feature is too nice to have it off.
I see several ways TC could use to fix it:
-Delay automatic refresh
-Check for messages during refresh
-Refresh in another thread

I believe that option 2 would be good and 3 - best.