Windows 8.1 causes external hard drives to auto-sleep?

There is a plan to fix. One part of the fix, hopefully, will be rolled out in a couple of weeks (2nd week of Jan is what I was told) through Windows update. In this fix, we have whitelisted (i.e disable power management) good numbers of devices that are listed in the table on the blog page. However, looking at the feedback we received, we realized that whitelisting this way isn't going to scale because the list seems to be growing by the day, so we have built a heuristic to enable power management selectively for scenarios where conserving battery is critical. This heuristics (required code change) is under test and I'm hoping we will be able to roll out either in Feb or March update.  I think the initial fix that's going to come out in Jan will cover majority of the high volume devices.

We believe that reverting it back completely to the Win8 behavior is not in the good interest of the ecosystem. If we don't tighten this now, industry will continue to make sloppy devices and we will all pay for poor user experience for lot longer - not just on Windows platform but on other platforms also.

So just few more weeks and hopefully most of you will not have to apply this registry hack.  Thanks for all your cooperation in providing the needed feedback on the blog site so we could understand the severity of the issue and take immediate action.

-Eliyas

I find it incredibly challenging to put in place all of these hacks to just have my drives work.

I have searched Windows, Dell, and Seagate Forums (I have 4 drives for external photos and backups etc.) and still I have the drives go to sleep, even when I am in the middle of things.

This is clearly a USB problem from MS.  MS, Is there any plan to fix this?  This is not some obscure Windows issue; it is core to the function of a system. 

What are folks to do who don't want to go in and mess around with the Registry? 

Eliyas Yakub, thanks for responding, but MS has got to have a plan to fix here?

Thanks.

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

Clearly this is a Microsoft Issue.  I have sent logs to Dell and Seagate all say Microsoft.

Can you tell me approxmately when the issue will be fixed and an update  or whatever will be released.

I too having the annoying problem of USB HDD spin down after 5 minutes, I found a solutions to this problem,  as reported in Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/5163869/stop-external-drives-from-spinning-down-with-nosleephd

Here is the direct link to the file:

http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/releases/view/24052

so far it work for me no more sleep mode on my USB HD, I recommend this until Microsoft fix this stupid problem they've created.

What say you Microsoft?