Hard Drive goes to Sleep

I have an HP Pavilion desktop pc (model no 500-120ea) running Windows 10. After a few minutes of not requiring access the built in hard drive (C drive) appears to go sleep. The reason I say that is that if I suddenly need access e.g.. to open or save a file I hear the hard drive starting up or speeding up and it takes several seconds for the action I am trying to execute to take place. This can be rather tiresome and I was wondering if there is a setting I could adjust to extend the time lapse before the hard drive powers down? The current setting in the power plan has the computer going to sleep after 3 hours.

Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings and select Change Advanced Power Settings. There is an option there specifying when to turn off the drive.

Hi Steve,
I didn't notice the Advanced Power settings before. I've now set the hard drive to keep running for 120 minutes instead of 20 (I seemed to me that it was powering down sooner than 20 mins) so we will see how that works. I hope that by doing this I will not seriously shorten the hard drive life. If you think this is a possibility I'll shorten the time to 60 mins say which probably would do.

A Gray said:

Hi Steve,
I didn't notice the Advanced Power settings before. I've now set the hard drive to keep running for 120 minutes instead of 20 (I seemed to me that it was powering down sooner than 20 mins) so we will see how that works. I hope that by doing this I will not seriously shorten the hard drive life. If you think this is a possibility I'll shorten the time to 60 mins say which probably would do.

I doubt that will be a problem. You might want to consider a SSD for vastly improved speed for your C: drive and use the current hard disk for your user files and backups of your OS on the C: drive?

Thanks again Steve, yes an SSD would be a lot faster but also more expensive and a lot smaller ( my C drive is ITB). When it's powered up my C drive is fast enough for my purposes so I think I'll just stick with that. So far no problems with the longer powered up time

You can now buy a 120GB SSD for c. £40 or a 240GB SSD for c. £60 so they are much cheaper than they used to be. My C: drive is a 180GB SSD and my OS & program files only take about 40% of the disk - all my user data is on a hard disk. Most people install the OS and programs on the C: drive and then use their hard drive for user data and backups of the OS. You could easily manage with a small cheap SSD for your OS & programms on the C: drive provided you use your current hard disk for user files. I use a 500GB SSD in my laptop since it's the only drive.

Hi again Steve, I didn't realise that SSD's had become relatively inexpensive so I may give them some more consideration. However, as I said, I find my present HDD fast enough for my purposes.