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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.
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'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.
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.
Can you try changing the power option for hard disk from 10 minutes to "Never" and see if that fixes your issue. To get there, search for "0Power Options" by using charms search, click on "Change plan settings", then go to "Change advanced power settings".
Please note that Windows 8.1 system suspends idle USB devices more aggressively than it used to do on Windows 8. As a result, you could run into device issues or a combination of device/hub/controller issues.
If this address you problem, please post make, model, VID/PID information of the storage device and the USB controller that the device is plugged into by using the device manager.
Most of the options in the above screenshot do not even show up on my Surface Pro 3, including "Hard disk". I have the Seagate Expansion 5TB drive. Leave it for a few minutes and Windows puts it to sleep whether I like it or not. This is no good at all. Needs to be fixed. I can't have my drives just going to sleep for nothing.
