[SOLVED] Seagate Backup Plus drive always spinning ?

Dec 20, 2020
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I recently purchased a 4TB Backup Plus series external USB drive. The drive, unlike another Toshiba drive, always remains active, even when it is not used.

The power management feature in Windows is activated only when the computer goes in stand-by.

I already contacted Seagate support who do not know, and there's no upgrade for the firmware. On TV I got the same issue. Once the disc is started even if I only watch TV, the drive remains active while the Toshiba does not. The drive remains active, like always spinning.

Do you have any suggestions?

Kind Regards.
 
Solution
Sorry but I need to ask the daft questions first.

The TV app/etc you use doesn't happen to be installed on the always spinning drive by any chance?
Did you change power management settings for USB or HDD? As this is technically both, make sure to update both settings. There may be BIOS options that also do this, whether better or not than Windows ones I don't know as your specs are completely unknown.

If you pass those questions with no glimmer of recognition.. As it's a backup drive it probably has backup option on by default. It could also have a cache which is it's buffer between data sent to it and then being written on it, which is then gradually caught up with. Both of these could turn it on/keep it on while doing low...

natcha12

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Sep 1, 2015
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Sorry but I need to ask the daft questions first.

The TV app/etc you use doesn't happen to be installed on the always spinning drive by any chance?
Did you change power management settings for USB or HDD? As this is technically both, make sure to update both settings. There may be BIOS options that also do this, whether better or not than Windows ones I don't know as your specs are completely unknown.

If you pass those questions with no glimmer of recognition.. As it's a backup drive it probably has backup option on by default. It could also have a cache which is it's buffer between data sent to it and then being written on it, which is then gradually caught up with. Both of these could turn it on/keep it on while doing low performance tasks.

Options will be on Power Plan-Advanced Settings for USB/HDD things like idle before stop times and energy saving USB mode
Just right clicking your drive in explorer and going into the properties, the cache settings will be there, sometimes called buffer flush/quick remove.

If those don't solve it then I imagine you have a pretty popular program or file on there that Windows or you loves to open up regularly
 
Solution
The product you've purchased is named "Seagate Backup Plus".

Consider this:
  • A backup drive is in general only supposed to be connected (when done properly) when the backup procedure is running.
  • Some backup jobs may take long time to process - say you're extracting from some slow format so that it have to stay running for hours. You don't want the drive to go "power saving" because maybe there is a long delay lag (maybe cache) while the extraction goes on.
Because of this, I think it's very reasonable that the disk behaves this way.