How to forcibly disable (spin down) an external USB hard drive?

Question

Let me start by listing what does not work:

Windows power options, disabling indexing for the drive or disabling the page file.

But it relates to internal drives and the updated version of RevoSleep utility seems to work in that case.

Is there any way to permanently spin down external drives without just turning them off via a hardware switch?

Addressing the comments:

@Tetsujin: This isn't true for any of the external drives I've owned. They do spin down but get woken up after just a couple minutes.

@spikey_richie: Ejecting does work but it needs a power cycle or replug to get the drive to show up again.

@Moab: Windows power settings don't work consistently.

Many USB enclosures don't pass on requests to spin up or down, they just keep on spinning whilst powered. — Tetsujin, Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 15:38
From my experience, this is a PITA no matter which way you go. I had a Western Digital my book that DID spin down automatically.. every time the OS wanted to look at the drive, explorer hung while it spun up. I ended up writing a windows service to ping the drive to keep this from happening. You might not like it if it does what you ask. — Señor CMasMas, Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 17:24

Emerson · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-03 16:35:26Z

0

For posterity:

Ejecting the drive does permanently spin it down (like spikey_richie suggested).

You can then un-eject the drive by twice (!) disabling and enabling the USB Mass Storage Device via device manager (How do I get Windows to re-attach a USB device without having to plug it in again?).

answered Mar 3, 2021 at 16:35

Emerson

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