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I am trying to have my HDDs stay spun down when not in use. Unfortunately Windows 11 keeps waking them up, even when the computer is idle. OS is Windows 11 Pro x64, fully updated, nothing else installed.

Settings: HDDs power down after 5 minutes in the Power Saving power plan.

Things I have tried:

  1. The following registry settings:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorPort]
"TelemetryPerformanceEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryErrorDataEnabled"=dword:00000000
"TelemetryDeviceHealthEnabled"=dword:00000000
"LogControlEnable"=qword:00000000

  1. Disable Recycle Bin on all affected drives.

  2. Kill explorer.exe task.

  3. Revosleep. Works but requires manual intervention every time, not of much use to me.

  4. Adding rules to not use Windows Search on affected drives.

  5. Disabling Windows Search service entirely.

  6. "Allow files on this drive to be indexed" checkbox.

  7. Removing unused apps such as Xbox stuff, phone link.

  8. Disable allowing apps to run in the background.

  9. Fully paused Windows update via O&O Shutup10.

  10. Disabled as much telemetry as possible via O&O Shutup10.

  11. Confirmed that virtual memory page file is only on the OS drive, not the affected drives.

  12. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoLowDiskSpaceChecks

  13. Disabled the SysMain service.

  14. Added the affected drives to the Windows Defender exception list.

Edit:

  1. Scheduled tasks. None are triggering every 10-20 minutes.

Edit 2:

  1. Mounted drive to a folder instead of a drive letter (e.g. c:\mnt\drive). Did not make any difference.

Unfortunately the drives still wake up regularly.

I am using Drive Power State to monitor their status. I have tried using Process Monitor with the filter set to the drive waking up to check for applications accessing the disk. Overnight no applications tried to access the affected disk, but it work up anyway, so clearly Process Monitor is not detecting what is causing it to wake.

I could not find anything relevant in Event Viewer for the times in question.

How can I see what is waking the drives?

user3241
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2 Answers2

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If Process Monitor doesn't show any access on file level, there might be some service accessing the HDD directly. (I've read your nothing else installed but just in case.)

I've found that many hardware monitoring tools trigger disk accesses and keep the drives from spinning down. For me, the cause was CrystalDiskInfo where the Auto Refresh features prevents HDD power save.

Actually, I couldn't find a simple replacement for SMART monitoring and ended up scripting a tools of my own using smartmontools: smartctl -n standby C: queries the powersave mode before doing any actual queries.

Zac67
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I have managed to identify the culprits for the most part.

Diagnostic Policy Service likes to wake drives for no reason. Disable the service. It's not clear what it does, seems to be more for Microsoft's benefit than yours.

Bitlocker Drive Encryption Service will wake drives periodically for some kind of pointless check. This service is only needed if you have a non-boot drive encrypted with BitLocker, or need to modify BitLocker settings. You can manually enable it when needed. Use VeraCrypt is a good alternative for non-system drives.

Microsoft Anti-Malware is the big one. It likes to randomly scan drives that haven't been touched by anything else. Unfortunately adding those drives to the list of exceptions doesn't help, it seems to be looking below the normal filesystem level for path exceptions don't stop it.

The only way I've found to stop it from waking drives is to disable it completely. You can do it via Group Policy or via a registry key. Obviously you must then accept not having any malware protection, or install an alternative that isn't out to wreck your hard drives.

Windows Search disable this for all affected drives.

With those three things done, drives sleep properly. Some things still wake them up for no reason, such as opening an RDP session. Maybe VNC is better.

user3241
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