Question How do I disable spindown/sleep of my SATA hard drives ?

[Calab]

I have a PC on my network with Windows 11 installed. I'm using it as a file server. Sometimes, when I try to access files on the server, there is a long pause before the files actually show up.

The drives installed are an HGST HDN726060 6TB HDD and a Seagate ST8000DM004 8TB HDD.

I believe that the drives are being spun down or put to sleep. Checking the SMART counters with GSmartControl, the HGST drive has 3154 start/stops and only 235 power cycle count. The Seagate is similar with 5022 and 1654.

The sleep settings in Windows are set to never turn off the hard disks, yet the drives are still spinning down.

Is there a way to permanently disable the sleep/spindown on these drives?

 

[Misgar]

I'm looking at Windows 10 Power Options and under Advanced Settings, I've set "Turn off hard disk after" to 0 minutes. I do this on all my Windows builds, plus other tweaks in Device Manager to stop USB hubs, WiFi chipsets and Ethernet NICs from powering down.

This link seems to confirm that '0' is the correct setting in Windows 11 too;
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/change-turn-off-hard-disk-after-idle-time-in-windows-11.10255/

I've checked several hard disks and M.2 drives and they all show identical Start/Stop and Power Cycle counts in Hard Disk Sentinel Pro, i.e. no unwanted power downs.