How to put external harrd drive to sleep in Windows 10

Hello,

I have external hard drives for data and system backups. I spend most of my time online or sending emails and only occasionally need to open a data file in my external drive. The external drives are spinning away needlessly in the meantime.

How can I set my currently updated Windows 10 to put my external drives to sleep after a selected idle time, while I still continue to work with my local C: drive?

Thank you.

Hello @BretMan,

Right click on Power icon on Taskbar / Power Options / Change plan settings / Change advanced power settings, expand Hard disk and set desired time. This should not affect your main (OS) disk because it's almost constantly in use by system.

If above solution does not help, you have to go to the sites of your disk manufacturers and look for supported apps which can do that. They usually have ones.