Summary
You may notice that your hard disk turns off after a specific period of inactivity. This setting is configured using the “Turn off hard disk after” setting in Power Options. This post written by MiniTool will help you prevent hard disk from going to sleep on Windows 10.
Prevent Hard Disk from Going to Sleep
If you configure the “Turn off hard disk after” setting in Power Options, then you can set the specified time (inactive) and then the hard disk will power off. This is done to save battery and thus extend the battery life of your PC.
This setting does not affect the SSD, and once the system resumes from sleep, it will take some time for you to turn on the hard drive before you can access it.
However, you don’t want the external hard disk or USB to go to sleep, so don’t worry because you can configure each drive or USB to go to sleep or not to go to sleep after a specified time if the PC is idle. The next part is about the methods.
Method 1: Change Plan Settings
First, you can change the power plan. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Type Control Panel in the Search box, then navigate to Power Options.
Step 2: Next to your currently selected power plan, click the Change plan settings option.
Step 3: Then click the Change advanced power settings link at the bottom.
Step 4: Then you can see the Turn off hard disk after option. You need to change the settings for On battery and Plugged in to specify after how many minutes (of idle time) you want the hard disk to turn off.
Note: The default is 20 minutes and it is not recommended to set a low amount of minutes. If you don’t want to turn off hard disk after PC inactivity, you can also set the above settings to Never.
Step 5: Click Apply and click OK. Then reboot your PC to save changes.
Then you can check if your hard disk still goes to sleep or not. If the issue persists, you can try the next method.
Method 2: Use Command Prompt
If it’s not successful to prevent hard disk from going to sleep by changing the Turn off hard disk after option. You can use Command Prompt. Here are the instructions.
Step 1: Type cmd in the Search box, right-click the fist result to choose Run as administrator to open Command Prompt.
Step 2: Type the following commands one by one and press Enter:
For “On Battery”: powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47–9041–4b5d-9b77–535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5–4a42-b16a-e040e769756e seconds
For “Plugged in”: powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47–9041–4b5d-9b77–535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5–4a42-b16a-e040e769756e seconds
Note:
1. Replace seconds with how many seconds you want to turn off hard disk after PC inactivity.
2. Also, using 0 (zero) will be the same as “Never” and the default value is 1200 seconds (20 minutes).
Step 3: Close Command Prompt and restart your PC.
If you are bothered by external hard drive keeps disconnecting, just use MiniTool data recovery tool to rescue data and then take measures to fix this issue.
Final Words
To sum up, this post has introduced how to prevent external hard disk from sleeping Windows 10. If you have any better solution to do that, please share it in the comment zone.
Originally published at https://www.minitool.com on December 11, 2019.
