Stopping a WD Green HD Going to sleep?
Community Forums/General Help/Stopping a WD Green HD Going to sleep?
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| Hi! Getting pretty fed up with this as I've looked online regarding this isssue but have as yet found anything that works or even info that shows exactly how to get it to work. Basically I have a Western Digital Green 1TB Hard Drive which goes in to sleep mode after not being used for 15 minutes or so. When I try accessing stuff on it it takes about 20 seconds to wake and make the files available. Is there a way to keep this drive in awake mode and prevent it from going to sleep? Thanks! |
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| There is a setting in Windows to prevent HDD's from going to sleep. Under windows 7: Control Panel -> Power Options Customize your power plan. Default setting IIRC shuts down HDD's after 15 minutes of inactivity, but you can disable that altogether. |
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| My parents PC used to go to sleep when the virus scanner was running...which meant that it would halt ... then when they awoke it again the virus scanner would say "200+hours left to finish scan"...and they'd wonder why it always took so long....would be nice if PCs recognised the difference between inactivity of the user and inactivity of the PC...same thing used to happen with my old pc with long render times... |
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| Thanks, xlsior! That seems to have done the trick. :) I assumed High performance mode which is what I have the settings on would not shut the Hard Disks down but it does. When customizing the power plan I noticed a few other things which could improve my performance so edited those also. Anyway, thanks for the info! |
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| Keep in mind though, that never shutting them down will probably diminish the lifespan of the drive compared to having them going to sleep after some time... |
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| Mind you, it takes a fair bit of power and mechanical stress to get a disk spinning, but little to keep it spinning. Obviously there is a break-even point, but i would have thought if you are spinning up and down every 10-20 minutes or even every few hours as opposed to after many hours of idle time it would likely do your disks more wear and tear than just letting them spin. Didn't google have some data about this? Last edited 2012 |
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| This isn't these new(?) green drives is it? I read about alot of new green drives being pretty unreliable. Something to do with low power use...? |
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| For the most part, the "green" label just enabled them to more easily sell drives at a lower 5400 RPM instead of the more typical 7200 rpm that drives used to run at. Lower rotation speed = lower power usage, but thanks to increased data densities the actual throughput speeds aren't any worse than they used to be. Anyway, in Amon's case it was the windows power saving feature that was responsible for the drive taking a nap, not the drive itself. |
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