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
    2014-10-16T01:27:53+00:00

    The sleep you are seeing could be due to hardware initiated sleep. With the update installed, the system will not force the device to go to sleep. One way to confirm that is by looking at the power state of the device in the device manager. You should see the current power state as D0 always. If that's not the case then I would be interested in digging into this more.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-16T04:40:15+00:00

    Power state is set at D0 and I still have this problem.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-17T00:09:03+00:00

    That tells me your device is sleeping on its own. From the OS perspective, the device is fully powered up (D0). This smells like a HW issue.

    -Eliyas

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-10-17T05:27:32+00:00

    So how come I didn't have this issue with Windows 7, Vista and XP

    only with Windows 8.1

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