Prevent Hard Drive from Going to Sleep in Windows 11/10 [Solution]

Troubleshooting when external drives go to sleep too often or irregularly, or don't wake up properly in Windows.

In this tutorial, we will see how to prevent your primary, secondary or external hard drive or USB from going to sleep on Windows 11/10/8/7 computer. You don't want your external hard drive to go to sleep, yet you find that it sometimes goes into sleep mode. Sleep is a power-saving state that allows you to quickly resume full-power operation when you want to start working again.

Issues covered in this tutorial:
prevent hard drive from sleeping Windows 10
prevent disk from sleeping Windows 10
Windows 10 prevents hard drive from sleeping
prevent external hard drive from putting Windows 11 to sleep
how to prevent hard drive from sleeping Windows 10
shut down Windows 10 hard drive to sleep
how to prevent hard drive from sleeping
Windows 10 prevents hard drive from sleeping
how to prevent hard drive from sleeping
Windows 10 prevents USB drive from sleeping

How to Stop Hard Drive from Going to Sleep in Windows 10: It is possible that after the recent Windows 10 update, you may notice that your hard drive shuts down after a specific period of inactivity. This is done in order to save battery power, which improves the battery life of your PC. This setting is configured using the "Turn off hard drive after" setting in Power Options which allows users to set a specified amount of time (of inactivity) after which the hard drive will turn off. This setting does not affect the SSD and once the system wakes from sleep state, it will take some time for the hard drive to turn on before you can access it.

This tutorial will apply to computers, laptops, desktops, and tablets running Windows 10 and Windows 11 (Home, Pro, Enterprise, Education) operating systems from all supported hardware manufacturers, such as Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, Alienware, Razer, MSI, Huawei, Microsoft Surface and Samsung.

Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.