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My Seagate Expansion Desktop External HDD keeps spinning down after just 30 secs of inactivity. First off I know there are already a lot of posts on how to stop this from happening and believe me I read through a lot of them and tried a lot of the solutions that were proposed to no avail so I wanted to post my specific experiences in the hope that someone can help me as it is getting very frustrating now.

I had been using the very same external HDD with a 4 year old HP Windows 10 laptop with no issues whatsoever (i.e. no constant spinning down and spinning up).

I recently upgraded to a higher performance LG Gram Laptop and it is when connected to this laptop that the HDD spins down after only 30s of inactivity. The laptop is plugged in when I use the external HDD and the external HDD also has its own power supply. I tried the following to try and stop the HDD from constantly spinning down:

  • Tried different USB ports
  • Set the power mode slider to Best Performance
  • Under device manager unticked Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power for the USB ports
  • Wrote a batch file for writing a dummy file in the drive and used Task Scheduler to repeat this every minute. But the drive spins down after only 30s so this wasn't enough. It just meant the drive kept spinning down and spinning back up every 30s.

I know there is no issue with the drive itself because it doesn't do this when connected to my old laptop. I then tried connecting the HDD to a Microsoft Surface tablet and the same problem happened: the drive spins down after 30 seconds. So the issue is not specific to the laptop either.

All three devices are running Windows 10 and yet on one of them (the oldest and the lowest performance one) the drive works fine but on the other two (LG Gram and Microsoft Surface) the drive keeps spinning down. The one thing I did notice is that on the LG Gram and Microsoft Surface, under power options, the high performance power plan is missing (I can only choose the Balanced plan) and the advanced power settings are also much more limited (there are no options for USB and HDD for example). Could this have something to do with it? Is it because the LG Gram and Microsoft Surface are fundamentally designed to run on lower power? But then again the HDD has its own power supply and I also keep the laptops plugged in when using the external HDD.

I am at a loss as to why it works fine on one laptop without having to play around with any settings and not on others. It shouldn't take this much effort to prevent a HDD from spinning down/ going to sleep. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

Thanks very much

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    Did this answer from 2015 provide any insight?
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 24, 2021 at 23:04
  • If you're referring to the top answer about APM settings, a lot of it went over my head to be honest.
    – eome
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 18:34

1 Answer 1

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Rather than write your own scheduled task, limited to 1 minute granularity, use KeepAliveHD or one of the many alternatives.

When I need quick access, I set such a utility to write files every 15 seconds. Of course, when I don't need immediate, continual access, I shut the app, letting the external HDD spin down. Some external drives are not designed for continuous use, and those will have a longer service life if allowed to stop. With a keyboard shortcut to the app, it just takes a few key presses to start it.

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  • Thank you. KeepAliveHD is working. Although this still seems like a work around rather than a solution to the root of the problem. It seems odd that the only way of keeping the drive spinning for more than 30s is to write a dummy file. I can understand why continuous use may not be good for the drive but surely spinning down every 30s when a user needs regular access would wear it quicker. It's also baffling that this issue occurs on some computer and not others, which suggests to me there must be some way of controlling this behaviour.
    – eome
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 18:45

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