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I have two hard disk drives in my Windows 8 desktop. The issue I am having is that the secondary hard drive goes to sleep frequently (I assume do to inactivity while I am only using the primary drive.) Then when I need to access it I hear it spin back up as my entire computer grinds to a halt for a couple seconds.

Is there anyway to prevent an internal hard drive from sleeping? I looked in the BIOS and didn't see anything, and there was no Power Management tab in device manger like there is for USB drives.

This behavior has occurred with other versions of Windows, so it is not specific to Windows 8. I am starting to wonder if it is a hardware feature of the drive. Haven't tried it under Linux or some other OS.

kestasx
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Jim McKeeth
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2 Answers2

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Control Panel, Power Options, Change Plan Settings, Change Advanced Power settings, then where it says "Turn Hard Disks after" instead of selecting a number of minutes, set it "never"

WikiWitz
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2

I have MSI laptop with SSD primary and HDD secondary, HDD goes to sleep in 30s. It is so frustrating every time I do something I have to wait a second or two, cause I keep only system on ssd the rest is on hdd. Found no way to adjust it in windows settings etc.

However, I worked off the Task Schedule approach that I found on internet for not letting external HDD to go to sleep HERE. There was a problem though, cause Scheduler wont allow <1min interval. So I wrote vbs script that copies 3 times at 0, 20 and 40s:

keepspinning.vbs

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
fso.CopyFile "C:\Temp\keepspinning.txt", "D:\", True
WScript.Sleep 20000
fso.CopyFile "C:\Temp\keepspinning.txt", "D:\", True
WScript.Sleep 20000
fso.CopyFile "C:\Temp\keepspinning.txt", "D:\", True

that I trigger at logon from Scheduler and run at 1min interval.

And that was the only way I came up with to deal with this annoyance, and it is safer for hdd not to spin up so much.

Hope it helps somebody.

Since, Jim asked about just reading, the following worked - open file for writing, you need to have the file on D: before you can run it:

Set objFileToWrite = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").OpenTextFile("D:\keepspinning.txt",2)
objFileToWrite.Close
Set objFileToWrite = Nothing

WScript.Sleep 20000
Set objFileToWrite = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").OpenTextFile("D:\keepspinning.txt",2)
objFileToWrite.Close
Set objFileToWrite = Nothing

WScript.Sleep 20000
Set objFileToWrite = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").OpenTextFile("D:\keepspinning.txt",2)
objFileToWrite.Close
Set objFileToWrite = Nothing
BGS
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