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
    2015-12-06T17:13:43+00:00

    Did this first. It might be the solution for some people on some systems for some external drives, but has no impact for me.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-12-06T16:51:50+00:00

    Sorry, didn't help...

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-12-06T07:26:22+00:00

    Problem solved for Windows 10]

    Hey guys!

    Whoever still having the issue with their external hard disk storage won't awake / not detected after PC or laptop go to sleep..

    So I'm a Windows 10 user and I just found out the solution that solve my problem after sometime searching for it.. What you need to is, you need to turn off the sleep mode for the hard disk in Power Plan Setting, here's how:

    1. Search for 'Power Options' from your desktop search bar, click
    2. Click Change Plan Settings -> Change Advanced Power Settings and make sure you change the hard disk setting 'Turn off hard disk after' to 'Never' for all of the power plan setting available. for example: '[Your Computer Brand] Active' & 'High Performance' and click Apply before you close the window.
    3. Restart. Hope it helps.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-11-06T05:16:17+00:00

    I took the Win10 upgrade and still have this problem.

    I look through documents for certain data and extract certain pages and it seems every time I find what I'm looking for, or spin the mouse wheel to scroll through more pages, the external USB drive has to spin back up again, and it feels like this is happening every couple minutes.

    This cannot be good for the drive--and neither should the workarounds that seek a file or play a media file every x minutes.

    I downloaded the nosleep program and after unzipping it, clicking on the exe file did nothing. So I right clicked it and tried Compatability mode, and it suggested settings to try and when I did it actually popped up to set the drive, timeout, etc, and put it in the Tray. So I set the drive and chose like 10 minutes and it was as if it was the same problem--already spun down in less than a couple minutes. I tried it at both 10 & 3 minutes.

    If it matters, I also previously set the Windows power settings earlier recommended (NEVER, etc) so for me, on a quad-core i7 laptop on AC power, I didn't get things fixed with Win10, nor with the unsleephd program.

    So back to square one...

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