Question How to prevent sleep USB external drives on Windows 11

[danny009]

I tried everything from USB 3 Link Settings to uncovering hidden power entries on control panel, none of them worked in my case, my 1tb hard drive (external) keep getting into sleep mode because I see its blinking light is turns off after a while and seems random too. I used ultimate power settings utility and device manager power management options as well. None of them worked and I have to use my drive all the time as I download to this drive. Sleep mode results in blue screen when I download save to location window because downloaded folder inaccessbile because drive keep sleeping. This is a asus rog g15 laptop 2022 please help me out. Thank you

This is 21h2 Windows 11 pro

 

[kerberos_20]

that sleep feature is inside your drive firmware
you could try your luck with crystaldiskinfo and its AAM and APM settings, but not all drives supports modification of it

 

[danny009]

Thanks for the fast reply, I really do not wish to modify such vital part of the system with a third party software since I'm kinda check everything freak. I noticed it says "performance" and "min power" in your picture. Should I switch to Better Performance via device manager>disks>rightclick>properties>policies tab? It's currently at "Quick removal".

 

[danny009]

Looks like that did it! Switching the policy from quick removal to better performance did the trick, thanks all and have a great day!

 

[danny009]

that sleep feature is inside your drive firmware
you could try your luck with crystaldiskinfo and its AAM and APM settings, but not all drives supports modification of it

Hey I just installed that little neat software, looks like my external drive supports APM and I did turned off the completely APM by clicking "disable" in that window. Hopefully this also fixes the sleep mode issue, thanks!

 

[adriancornea52]

Hi Danny. What worked for me was to change the setting in power options which appears here: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/prevent-hard-drive-going-sleep-windows (first guidance). But be alert that you should only do this if you don't have an internal hard disk.