Hard Drives Take Long Time to Respond After Being Idle

Mojavemojo · Feb 13, 2017

I'm using Windows 7 x64, and I have 3 internal hard drives (2x SSD, 1x mechanical) and 2 external hard drives (connected via USB 3.0) and when they've been inactive for a while, it takes about 7-9 seconds for them to come them back on line, which is very annoying, especially when I'm in a hurry. This is happening to both internal and external drives, SSD and mechanical, although I have my Power Settings > Hard Disk - "Turn off hard disk after" set to "Never" and the USB Selective Suspend Setting" is disabled. So why is this happening and what can I do about it? I tried asking this question before and someone said this was normal but it's definitely not normal; I've had many computers over the years and have never had this problem before with an internal hard drive. Any ideas?

InvalidError · Feb 13, 2017

Make sure the power management profile where you set HDD sleep to 'never' is actually your currently active power management profile.

Mojavemojo · Feb 13, 2017

Yes, I've checked that and it is, so that isn't the problem.

BFG-9000 · Feb 13, 2017

This is often an intentional feature in the firmware of drives, particularly "green" ones--the drive will spin down after a set time of no activity all by itself. It's why green drives are usually not recommended for RAID arrays as the timeout can make the array appear degraded or failed. It can be helpful with some nearline solutions like routers and external USB enclosures that are too dumb to support power saving.

Some brands of drives have a bootable utility that allows you to change this setting but others use it for market segmentation to force you to buy more enterprise-oriented drives for RAID.

Mojavemojo · Feb 13, 2017

I knew that about "Green" drives, which is why I made sure not to buy one. Still, I could see how this could potentially be an intentional feature on my external drives (a portable Seagate and a Fantom G Force with its own power supply) but this is happening even with my internal Samsung SSD drives.

BFG-9000 · Feb 13, 2017

Sometimes the enclosure itself is designed to send a spindown command. I do notice that all recent versions of Windows freeze up if ANY drive is spinning up or otherwise unresponsive. Windows 10 is the worst as it even freezes everything to check if an empty floppy drive has something in it--which it seems to do several times a minute for some mysterious reason only known to Microsoft. I had to disable them all in the BIOS. And yes this dumb behavior prevented access to my Samsung SSDs also.

Mojavemojo · Feb 13, 2017

How did you disable them all in the BIOS? I think I'm going to have to do that too but I have no idea what to look for once I get into BIOS.

BFG-9000 · Feb 13, 2017

Where you select Floppy type 2.88, 1.44 etc just pick Disabled or None.

If it turns out to be your external drives causing the issue just turn them off until you need to use them. You can leave the USB cable attached--just unplug the power until they are needed.

Mojavemojo · Feb 14, 2017

Why Floppy? These aren't floppy drives. Also, I don't want to disable the drives, just make it so they don't "sleep" and are always online.

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Hard Drives Take Long Time to Respond After Being Idle

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