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My 2 external hard drives are always active as I have disabled auto sleep. I didn't have this problem way since Windows 7, but after upgrading to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8, my 2 external hard drives will automatically went to sleep around 10 minutes of inactivity. I have tried the power options, device manager options, but to no avail. Any help? Thanks.
I'm using NoSleepHD as a temporary fix but I hope there's a permanent fix for this.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Thanks for the trace. We will analyze and get back to you. We published a blog on this yesterday to bring awareness and get help from the community to root-cause the issue. We think this is all due to suspending the device when idle which we never used to do in previous OSes. We will find out if this turns out to be something else.
Thanks Michael for your ideas - I'm in a very different situation as I am using a lightweight laptop on the go, and am attaching and detaching HDDs all the time. However, from my recent experience mentioned above in my reply to another sufferer, maybe this switching off USB ports is limited to when I actually have an external HDD rather than anything else attached. In which case I suppose I can live with it, using either your fix (the music) or what someone else suggested: a little utility which writes something to the disk every five minutes to stop it from dying, such as NoSleepHD.
Hope they fix it for W10, but I'm not optimistic.
I'm not too optimistic about W10 - the Microsoft team clearly don't understand what's going on so I doubt they will manage to fix this in the next iteration of Windows - unless they revert back to W7 code, which is unlikely. I seem to remember one of the earlier posts stating that they implemented all of thisaggressive energy saving was to achieve even fractional advantages in battery life. I expect they're pretty nervous about the Apple OS's efficiency in this sphere.
Well about 5 seconds after I received your reply i was using my mouse to access my HDD which I had just plugged in to back up some files when it all went dead on me: USB ports (and hence HDD and mouse) and my touchscreen deactivated.
Interestingly enough, I had been working solidly for two hours w/out the HDD plugged in, so does this only happen when external drives are connected to a USB ?
I have a old Hp Compaq nc6400 with windows 8.1 and my usb drives are sleeping every 10 minutes, so I had to use keepalivehd. The wasn't this problem with windows 7.
