Windows 10: Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

How to: Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

How to Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10


The NVMe.

Having your HDDs automatically turned off after being idle can help save energy and extend a PC's battery life.

When you or anything tries to access a HDD that has been turned off, there will be a delay of a few seconds as the HDD automatically spins back up and is turned back on before being able to access it.

This tutorial will show you how to turn off hard disks after being idle for specified minutes or to never in your power plan in Windows 10.

*note If you have set to turn off hard disk after idle, then you will experience a delay if you restart explorer since you will have to wait for all disks turned off to spin back up and turn on before explorer is restarted.


CONTENTS:

• Option One: To Change Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle Setting in Power Options
• Option Two: To Change Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle Setting in Command Prompt

OPTION ONE [/i] To Change Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle Setting in Power Options
1. Open your advanced power plan settings.

2. Expand open Hard disk and Turn off hard disk after, set how many minutes or never for what you want, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below)

*note The default is 20 minutes. It is not recommended to set a low amount of minutes. Doing so can cause more wear and tear on HDDs since they will spin up and down more often.









OPTION TWO [/i] To Change Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle Setting in Command Prompt
1. Open a command prompt.

2. Enter the command(s) below you want to use into the command prompt, and press Enter. (see screenshots below)

(On battery)
*Arrow powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e <seconds>

AND/OR

(Plugged in)
*Arrow powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e <seconds>

*note Substitute <seconds> in the commands above with how many seconds you want to turn off hard disk after.

Using 0 (zero) seconds will be the same as "Never".

The default data value is 1200 seconds (20 minutes).








That's it,
Shawn


Related Tutorials

• How to Change Power Plan Settings in Windows 10
• How to Add or Remove 'Turn off hard disk after' from Power Options in Windows
• How to Add or Remove 'Hard disk burst ignore time' from Power Options in Windows
• How to Add 'AHCI Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM' to Power Options in Windows
• How to Turn On or Off USB Selective Suspend in Windows 10
• How to Add or Remove 'SEC NVMe Idle Timeout' from Power Options in Windows 10
• How to Add or Remove 'Device idle policy' from Power Options in Windows

:)

 

why does Windows 10 give me lockups/freezes?

just found out Windows 10 had this enabled within power management settings "Turn off hard disks after idle."

seems like microsoft has never fixed this bug at all.

 

Win10 1709 keeps waking up hard disk all the time

1. It's about waking up HARD DISK (from idle/quiet to loud spinning), not waking up computer. For example if I'm just browsing the net or watching a movie, the mechanical disk used to be idle/quiet before the update. Now it's being activated regularly for
no obvious reason.

2. All drivers should be up-to-date. There are no warnings in Device Manager.

3. See 1.

4. Well, I walked through all the settings and tried to turn off as many Windows "features" as possible. Those used to be turned off (before the update), but damn update re-enabled everything.

 

Hey Gary, *Smile

It'll affect any connected HDD that sits idle after the specified minutes. Of course the OS HDD may not turn off after the specified minutes until Windows is finished doing anything with the HDD.

 

But when I place my PS in sleep, the Hard Drive does turn off Right?

 

Oh yes, sleep and shut down will always turn off the HDD.

This is only for idle HDDs while Windows is still running.

 

Thanks Shawn , that is why at least for me I would have to be using two hard drives or an SSD +HD.

 

Is it possible to set to never by registry or Command Prompt?

 

It's just not worth the effort to do so since this setting is also dependent on the specific power plan selected. Of course this will vary to much be usable. *Sad

 

What I found here was I could go into the advanced settings for each power plan option including creating your own custom plan and change the hard drive setting from the default 20 minutes in Balanced for example to never as well as having the display set to never in each plan and click on the save changes option when exiting. I found that out in previous versions before 7 even where the defaults would end up being reset if I saw any unexpected hard boots when a program locked and the display would turn off after being set to remain on all the time.

The only thing involving the system registry as far as power plans go was backing the registry settings for the plan selected. You don't want to be going into the registry otherwise when not necessary to make changes there. The power plan scheme was what was backed up on previous versions. That had been the "power.cfg -export C:" command to make a back up copy of the present power plan that was applied.

It would interesting to find out if the same type of command will work for 10. That had been the "default.pow" file. The reverse could also be seen by importing the default plan if you found the settings had returned to their defaults for some reason. That of course would include the setting for the hard drive never or turn off after so many minutes option it was set for. As far as each individual plan you can still make the changes in setting by going into the Advanced settings as the guide here shows.

 

Thanks for the tutorial buddy.

 

Thanks for the reply!

 

Hello.How can i turn off sleep for disks?

 

Hello Thanos, *Smile

If you mean for when HDDs are idle, then you could set this to "Never" to do so.

 

How can I get USB connected drives to sleep when not in use ?