How to setup Windows to not put my external drive to sleep?

Solution 1:

Go into the Power Options in Control Panel, then click on "Change Plan Settings" for your plan, then there should be an option "Change advanced power settings", then look under the "Hard Disk" and "USB Settings" areas.

This one may not be the actual answer, but set your "Turn off Hard Disk after" to never (set 0), but I think the real one is to set "USB selective suspend settings" to "disabled" at least when plugged in...but maybe also when on battery if you are using it that way when it happens.

Solution 2:

Windows USB are set to be disabled if idle to save power, you can disable this function by going to

• Control Panel
• Device Manager
• Universal Serial Bus controllers (expend this)

You should see a list of Generic USB Hub

Right click on each one of them and select Properties | Power Management and uncheck the Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power

Solution 3:

Try this piece of software: NosleepHD: http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/ It writes an empty file every minute.

Solution 4:

I'm encountering the same issue (Windows 8.1) and none of the "power setting" solutions worked for me.

I ended up playing a movie file, an audio file... anything that cause regular accesses to the disk.

For less overhead, it should be feasible to write some script that just regularly access the disk, before it goes to sleep.

edit: here is a quick script that does the job.

A blank file "mzt7dbs5ffxamzsj.txt" (just some random name) will be created (then regularly written to) at the same location as the batch file:

@ECHO OFF
SET FILE=%~dp0mzt7dbs5ffxamzsj.txt
SET TIMEOUT=30

ECHO.
ECHO File: %FILE%
ECHO Timeout: %TIMEOUT% seconds
ECHO.
ECHO Script is running...

:LOOP
TYPE NUL > "%FILE%"
TIMEOUT /T %TIMEOUT% /NOBREAK > NUL
GOTO LOOP

side notes:

• I tried DIR but it didn't work as the results are cached. There should be some way that doesn't require to use a file.
• Resource of interest: How to create empty text file from a batch file?
• Debugging was easy as my drive spins down every 40 seconds >_<