External drives powering down... :"

Kol · 28 Feb 2009 at 13:48

Hi guys,

No doubt a ridiculously simple quesiton, but whenever I seem to sit back at my PC (Vista) my rarely used external drive has powered down. It's a useful energy saver, I know, but I don't want it to be in 'sleep' mode or whatever because when performing simple tasks the computer holds back until it's spin up and it's an annoyance.

Can I stop this? I've been into power management and ensured that the option for powering down the drive is set to NEVER but it's occurring. Basically, I want this to perform as always on. I don't want any power management on my drives.

Cheers!

Defenestration · 28 Feb 2009 at 20:37

I only have XP, but it's probably similar on Vista. Go to Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager. Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers item and you should see some USB Root Hub entries. To find the one where your HD is attached to, detach all other USB peripherals apart from you HD. Go through each USB Root Hub entries, right-click it and select Properties, and then go to the Power tab.

For one of them, there should be an entry for the USB Mass Storage Device in the "Attached devices" list. When you find this one, select the Power Management tab and un-check "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

HTH

Kol · 28 Feb 2009 at 20:39

Defenestration - thanks! Will gave that a shot.

Defenestration · 28 Feb 2009 at 20:43

No problem. Let me know if it works or not.

Kol · 1 Mar 2009 at 11:49

Cheers for the info, gave it a shot, all those bits were already unchecked

It's just annoying because I also stream to my 360 and when browsing it just hangs until the drive has spun up... a little thing I know but still annoying.

theheyes · 1 Mar 2009 at 12:11

What brand of external drive is it? I'm wondering if it might have it's own power-down function built in that isn't visible to Windows.

NorthstaNder · 1 Mar 2009 at 13:01

I've got a seagate drive that does that, although I don't mind, but I'm sure theheyes is on to something. I seem to recall it having it's own settings menu so it could be the same for your drive Kol.

Rabtech · 1 Mar 2009 at 13:30

Western Digital Externals have a built in power saving spin down feature, not 100% sure you can disable it either.

Kol · 1 Mar 2009 at 17:42

Well, it's a normal SATA drive that I have plugged into a sata->sub caddy. It's a 750GB Barracuda and the other is a maxtor 500GB external drive. The first one (which is the one I don't want to power down) isn't an off the shelf external drive, merely a standard SATA drive.