All External Drives Never Sleep

Happy Holidays everyone. :)

For some time now I have been experiencing the problem that no external HDD sleeps and I must simply keep them unplugged until needed. Nothing I do in Power Options works. Last week I allowed my system to install all available Windows Updates, and yesterday while I was installing a new graphics card to handle my new 4K SMART TV I added a USB 3.0 card which contains 2 ports. I plugged in 2 external drives to see if they would go to sleep after being connected off the mainboard ports and still all 4 external drives stayed running all night. I've changed Power Options from 1 minute to 20 minutes but they never shut off no matter what the time is set to.

My current version of Windows is 10 Pro, 1903, OS Build 18362.535.

No changes I've made through the registry, Device Manager, nor Policies through each HDD Properties have worked.

Anyone have the solution to this issue? I feel it is just a matter of time before all these drives burn up and all data will be lost.

Thank you. Cole

Thank you for your quick response, Compumind. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing that scans these hard drives or keeps them running for any known process. To be double sure, I just checked the configuration of Avira Free, and it is not configured to scan drives regularly.

Since the Power Options has virtually never worked in powering down the HDD at the specified time, I tried the Command Prompt Administration level 'powercfg' for 1200 seconds, or 20 minutes. I'll keep my fingers dually crossed this will work. I will post a reply tomorrow morning (it's 17:05 here in Thailand) and let y'all know the results. :)

Again, thank you, and Happy Holidays to you and your loved ones.

Jacee said:

Just out of curiosity.... why do you need to have the external drives plugged in all the time?

My PC is used as a personal server since I live and teach at a major university, and all my materials are on this PC which can be accessed from anywhere on our campus. Additionally, it is also my main source of entertainment, i.e. movies, TV shows, etc., and all of those files reside on these external devices. Everything had resided on a WD MyCloud 16TB NASD until last year when every single drive went bad. Since my last job in America had been a Hardware Test Engineer for Maxtor NSG, I've got experience with both computer & network engineering, and never once in 26 years had I ever seen 4 HDDs go bad at the same time. It destroyed almost all of my data, and what was remaining now resides on these external drives which must stay connected. However, if they continue to run non-stop, it's just a matter of time before one or more of them crashes.

As for my testing, COMPUMIND, I reran a driver update program which updated several USB Composite and one HUB driver. A couple of hours later all drives were still running, so I change the Power Option from High Performance to Balanced leaving the HDD Idle shutdown the same at 20 minutes. Three of the drives now go idle after around 30 minutes, but one stay running hot, so I have been forced to turn it off. I'm going to buy a new external case for it this weekend, and see if that fixes this drive's inability to go idle.

I can understand the desire to see the drives spin down when idle, however, I can tell you from experience that the absolute worst thing for the longevity of a HD is frequent spin up / down cycles. Note that this is not idle speculation. I worked for a major storage company for 12+ years and I saw the numbers. BY FAR the most frequest failure of disks occurs after the disks have spun down and remained powered off for a time. Upon spinning back up they would exhibit multiple different failure modes. Note too that I'm not talking about a couple cycles a day. If the drives are spun up / down many times a day, that's where the main problems occur. Consumer disks have the longest lifespan when not run 24 x 7 but if you have people from all over access the drives as you noted then NAS rated drives are best and it's best to allow them to run 24 x 7.

Whenever a major customer would have a power outage or they had to shut systems down due to AC failure, we always knew that we would be shipping lots of replacement disks when power was restored.

Note that this of course assumes that the enclosure is providing proper cooling. If you really do have problems with one or more drives running extremely hot, then that adds a whole new set of issues.

I've got the same problem, but I don't know why are you think the OS is affecting it. I haven't found the solution yet, but this information must be on the HDD's PCB, so it has nothing to do with the OS. I've got an Adata HV620 which spins-down after 10 minutes inactivity and it knows it out of the box, so this setting is saved to the HDD's PCB.

I've written to other forums, so I just copying my question:

I've got two external hard drives, an Adata (with Toshiba HDD in it) and a Seagate branded HDD. The Adata automatically switch off or goes to sleep mode after 10 minutes of inactivity (even the indicator LED is switched off, the manufacturer set it, I haven't done anything with it) while the Seagate keeps spinning until it's connected. I used to not to disconnect my external HDD and with my Adata HDD it wasn't a problem, but I have to disconnect my new Seagate HDD otherwise it will wear out very fast.

How can I set the spin-down / standby / sleep / idle time for an external HDD? I want a solution in which case the setting is saved to the HDD's PCB, so it will standby after x minutes if I connect it to an other computer too, so no programs needed to run in the background to do this.

I changed its APM settings with CrystakDiskInfo and Victoria and it worked, but it did not saved the changes permanently (and the indicator LED is not turning off), so if the program stops the APM settings change back to default. And an other problem is that I set the APM to 127 or 7F and it standby after 1 minute what I find very few, if I know it well it has to standby after around 10 minutes with this value.

Both HDD's APM settings are the same, so Adata did it in another way.

Or how can I access the Adata's settings, so I could just copy them and set my Seagate HDD the same way.

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hsehestedt said:

I can understand the desire to see the drives spin down when idle, however, I can tell you from experience that the absolute worst thing for the longevity of a HD is frequent spin up / down cycles. Note that this is not idle speculation. I worked for a major storage company for 12+ years and I saw the numbers. BY FAR the most frequest failure of disks occurs after the disks have spun down and remained powered off for a time. Upon spinning back up they would exhibit multiple different failure modes. Note too that I'm not talking about a couple cycles a day. If the drives are spun up / down many times a day, that's where the main problems occur. Consumer disks have the longest lifespan when not run 24 x 7 but if you have people from all over access the drives as you noted then NAS rated drives are best and it's best to allow them to run 24 x 7.

Whenever a major customer would have a power outage or they had to shut systems down due to AC failure, we always knew that we would be shipping lots of replacement disks when power was restored.

Note that this of course assumes that the enclosure is providing proper cooling. If you really do have problems with one or more drives running extremely hot, then that adds a whole new set of issues.

What are you recommend for me? My oldest HDD spins-down after 10 minutes inactivity, the manufacturer set it, so I did nothing with it and I found this very useful because I rarely disconnect it from my laptop and I also using my laptop as server sometimes, but noone else uses it, so in this case I'm the only user. However my never HDDs never spins-down and I'm afraid that they will wear out faster if they spinning all the time, so my question is: should I set my newer HDDs to spin-down after a certain time or it is better that they are spinning all the time?