Windows 10: Build 10240 hard disk spins down / sleeps in 20 seconds

Hello,
I have an Asus q400a laptop that I have a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB in the primary SATA slot, and a mechanical HDD (HGST HTS541075A9E680) where the DVD drive used to be for data storage. After upgrading to Windows 10 from 8.1, the mechanical hard drive spins down after less than 20 seconds of inactivity, despite power settings (which are set for 20 minutes). This causes excessive spinning up and down of the drive.

I have tried a program called nosleephd that writes to the drive to keep it active periodically, but it operates on a timescale of minutes, not seconds. It would have to write very often to keep it awake.
edit: KeepAliveHD program allows seconds interval. This solves the symptoms, but I still feel there is an underlying problem.

Is there a way to make the hard drive heed the power settings timeout under the new driver scheme? Thanks.

:)

 

Windows 10 ignores power settings for USB external hard drives

I have a seagate 2.5" 1TB USB 3.0 external drive, model NA423EPR, that will always spin down after only 3 minutes of inactivity on Windows 10. My previous computer had Windows 7, and on that OS, the same external hard drive would happily stay spinning 24/7,
always.

This hard drive has its own internal setting for spinning down after inactivity. It was set to never, but using a special Seagate tool I changed it to 1 hour to see if that would make a difference. But it didn't. It still spins down after exactly 3 minutes.

I am already using the "High performance" power plan.

USB selective suspend setting is set to "Disabled".

Hard disk is set to "Turn off hard disk after: On battery: 30 minutes; Plugged in: 60 minutes".

And yet it STILL spins down after exactly 3 minutes.

The following is worth also mentioning: This laptop computer (an Acer VN7-791G) has an SSD for the OS and an internal 2.5" mechanical hard drive for other storage. I noticed that the internal mechanical drive was shutting itself off after merely 20 seconds
of inactivity. The hard drive in question was a WD Blue 1TB WD10JPVX. I looked around and found tons of complaints about this hard drive model ignoring power settings and always shutting down after just 20 seconds. So what I did was, I opened the laptop and
I replaced the hard drive with an older 2.5" 320GB drive, and this one actually stayed spinning as it should.

But, the seagate external drive still isn't staying on.

Also, I should mention that the seagate drive cannot be left idle on a USB 3.0 port, because it randomly disconnects/reconnects. It never does this when it's on a USB 2.0 port, or when it is actively being used on USB 3.0.

I also looked at the Power Management tab for all USB root hubs, to make sure that the option "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" was unchecked, and they all were unchecked already.

Can someone please explain this? If this continues I'm going to have to install a
program that writes to my external seagate drive once every 2 minutes to keep it spinning, which is a ridiculous fix; but, if Microsoft will not help me, I'll have to do it...

So, how do we get started fixing this problem?

 

Updating Windows (Ring is stuck at 40% )

What's your BIOS version? I'm updating to A12 now. It was on A11. I did a hard shut down after it froze at 40% and it went back to Windows 10 build 10240. Need more battery life before I can try installing form a USB disk next.