Windows 8.1 causes external hard drives to auto-sleep?

Anonymous
2013-10-27T07:38:58+00:00

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.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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Anonymous
2013-11-01T15:32:42+00:00

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.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/usbcoreblog/archive/2013/11/01/help-after-installing-windows-8-1-my-usb-drive-disappears-or-file-transfers-stop-unexpectedly-r-a-post-title.aspx

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-10-31T23:16:16+00:00

    Same problem here, it's insanely annoying, I purchased an external 8bay Probox for one reason, make it less annoying to work with/add my hard drives and have easy access to my networked drives. How exactly is this making my life easier if they're turned off every 10 minutes. I honestly don't understand how there isn't a patch for this yet, it's a huge issue and anyone with a home network should be pissed (as I am).

    Oh and I've done the following. Disabled Selective Suspend for USBs, changed every USB related item under Universal Serial Bus in Device Manager that could be changed to not be allowed to be shut off to save power. I've also tried setting Selective Suspend to something other than 0 (never) such as 600, 60 etc. and it still turns off after 10 minutes of idling.

    I've been defending Windows 8 since it came out, saying it's just people having problems with change, but this isn't that, this is a major issue for me and my multicomputer home network -_-.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-10-31T22:08:09+00:00

    Can somebody collect USB storage trace and make it available?

    From an elevated command prompt run the following command:

    logman start -ets BOT -p {72FB9358-A9B3-41E0-AE41-E8DECA41E3A8} 0xffffffff 0xff  -o %SystemRoot%\Tracing\bot.etl

    <wait for the drive to power down and back up>

    logman stop -ets BOT

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-10-31T20:50:42+00:00

    Exact same problem here after update from 8 to 8.1. Every few minutes both my external drives power down at the same time and then back up again in another few minutes. NOT good for performance, USB ding dong sounds or the health of the drives. Exceptionally annoying. I have to Seagate drives, ont 2 TB and one 1 TB, the first one with USB 3.

    Will also try that temporary fix, but it's really too bad that there's a downgrade like this in the new version. So far, this problem and the "SecureBoot isn't configured correctly" one are the only two I've had. Windows 8 was zero problems so it tarnished the fresh Win feel a bit.

    Hoping for a real fix!

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