USB drive sleeps in less than 3 and a half minutes

I am astounded that Microsoft won't let us choose whether or not our USB drive goes to sleep. It sleeps in less than 3.5 minutes. I'm working on a file, and every time I want to save changes I have to wait for the drive to spin up before I can continue. It's like being back in 87 when you had to wait for the computer before you could do anything. When Win 10 first came out I couldn't believe that they would do this, but I thought that surely they would fix this ridiculousness before long but here we are a year later and this is still a problem. I know that I can install mickey mouse software that will write to the HD every minute to keep it awake but this is stupid. And I should not have to spend hours researching how to keep the HD from going to sleep with registry hacks, I'm not a rocket scientist. If I can set an internal HD to not go to sleep so I can use it when I want to then why can't I use my external when I want to? It's stuff like this that makes people go to Apple.

I was surprised to see such a simple solution proposed when I have read so many people complaining about it, and reading about registry hacks etc to solve this ridiculous problem. It was too easy to be true. Microsoft wants me to jump through a lot more hoops than that to fix their shortcoming. Thanks for the suggestion but it didn't work. I did as you suggested, rebooted the computer to make sure it "took", and plugged in the USB drive. It went to sleep in less than a minute and a half, rebooted and tried again - same thing, about a minute and a half. What a joke Microsoft is; I just can't believe that I have to invest so much time into trying to fix this. If I wasn't so heavily invested into Windows with 8 PCs I would switch to Apple.

I have a bunch of WD Passports and My Books that never did this with Windows 7, and I have read a lot of people's complaints about this problem that started with Windows 8, and I have used software called "Keep Alive Hard Drive" that was written specifically because of Microsoft's refusal to satisfy their customers by allowing them to disable this boat anchor from their computers. I've seen registry hacks that apparently worked in Win8 to disable this joke that Microsoft has played on us that no longer work in Win10. This is a Win10 problem, not my hard drives.

I hope it's ok to add this here - I originally wrote it as a reply to a Microsoft community thread about the same issue, but it turns out that thread is locked so I can't put it there. I just really want to post it somewhere where people having the issue might find it - I found very few results on Google about this exact issue, but none that mention the solution I've now found, and this is one of the few that's still allowing replies.

I've just tried all of the things mentioned [on the Microsoft thread] (one at a time, unplugging and plugging in the drive after each change of setting, but not rebooting, and not trying the ones that involve a program writing to the disk every few minutes as that's not really a proper fix).

The one that seems to work for me is turning off "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" on the USB Mass Storage Device which the drive itself is part of (not the USB controller or hub). This is on Windows 10 version 2004, with WD My Passport 2 TB and 4 TB USB 3.0 drives (both bought this year). In my case they were turning off somewhere between 3-3.5 minutes after the last use of the drive. With this setting changed, they now don't go to sleep until the (much longer) sleep time that I've set on the drives themselves (using the WD Drive Utilities software).

The easiest way to find the correct device and change the setting is to open Device Manager, go into Disk drives, and click on the disk (so that it's highlighted in the list). Then go to the View menu and click "Devices by connection". This should then show you where the drive is in that view, and you can just go up one level from there to the USB Mass Storage Device which contains it. Open the properties of that, Power Management tab, and untick Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.



I've also discovered something else. I have HWiNFO running (in Sensors only mode) most of the time so that I can keep an eye on things, and if I start it after a drive is connected (which means it detects it during startup and shows the temperature and some other information from the drive), it seems like whatever polling its doing to update the information every few seconds actually keeps the drive awake too. This is actually a drawback for me, as I do want the drives to go to sleep at some point, just not as quickly as Windows was doing, and HWiNFO seems to keep them awake constantly regardless of all other settings including the sleep timer set on the drives themselves. The activity light on the drive flashes every few seconds (i.e. when HWiNFO updates its readings), and the drive carries on spinning, but it doesn't sound like it causes any actual drive head activity at all, so it's probably a better option than having something writing to the disk all the time for anyone who can't get anything else to work.

EddyM said:

The one that seems to work for me is turning off "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" on the USB Mass Storage Device which the drive itself is part of (not the USB controller or hub). This is on Windows 10 version 2004, with WD My Passport 2 TB and 4 TB USB 3.0 drives (both bought this year). In my case they were turning off somewhere between 3-3.5 minutes after the last use of the drive. With this setting changed, they now don't go to sleep until the (much longer) sleep time that I've set on the drives themselves (using the WD Drive Utilities software).

Just to add my experience. Eddy's solution works for me as well. I've been using it on a old HP external HDD. That prevents spin down until the firmware sleep time kicks in.
Cheers,
Mark

+1 from me.

I tried the setting the "Selective Suspend" but any external disk drive (externally powered too) connected to the laptop would still be powered down after 2-3 minutes. I then found this thread and made the change in the Device Manager as posted by EddyM.

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I think that it would be worth adding a clarification to the "Selective Suspend" tutorials, that they refer to USB Hub devices, not to USB Mass Storage devices. I, for one, did not know that there was a difference until I browsed this forum :). And, maybe, a new tutorial describing EddyM's solution for disk drive power management would be valuable.