Windows 10: USB drive sleeps in less than 3 and a half minutes

I am astounded that Microsoft won't let us choose whether or not our USB drive goes to sleep. It sleeps in less than 3.5 minutes. I'm working on a file, and every time I want to save changes I have to wait for the drive to spin up before I can continue. It's like being back in 87 when you had to wait for the computer before you could do anything. When Win 10 first came out I couldn't believe that they would do this, but I thought that surely they would fix this ridiculousness before long but here we are a year later and this is still a problem. I know that I can install mickey mouse software that will write to the HD every minute to keep it awake but this is stupid. And I should not have to spend hours researching how to keep the HD from going to sleep with registry hacks, I'm not a rocket scientist. If I can set an internal HD to not go to sleep so I can use it when I want to then why can't I use my external when I want to? It's stuff like this that makes people go to Apple.

:)

 

Screens won't power off in Windows 10

Hi

I've tried it, and the message I get is 'Security Update for Window (KB3200970) is already installed on this computer'. I've set the PC to sleep after half an hour, but it goes to sleep after less than 5 minutes, as soon as I turn my back on the computer.
The screens still don't power off on their own but the PC is going to sleep far more quickly than I would like.

 

Windows 10 Goes to sleep mode randomly and can't turn back on

Mine is an HP Envy. I have reset to default settings (screen 5 & 10 minutes, system 15 and 30) and it still sleeps after less than 3 minutes inactivity. To be precise, it repeatedly sleeps after 2 minutes and 20 seconds (140 seconds). I timed it 3 times
consecutively on a stopwatch! Sad but true

 

If USB selective suspend is enabled, external drives will go to suspend state when not used. Disable it in Advanced Power Options:

 

I was surprised to see such a simple solution proposed when I have read so many people complaining about it, and reading about registry hacks etc to solve this ridiculous problem. It was too easy to be true. Microsoft wants me to jump through a lot more hoops than that to fix their shortcoming. Thanks for the suggestion but it didn't work. I did as you suggested, rebooted the computer to make sure it "took", and plugged in the USB drive. It went to sleep in less than a minute and a half, rebooted and tried again - same thing, about a minute and a half. What a joke Microsoft is; I just can't believe that I have to invest so much time into trying to fix this. If I wasn't so heavily invested into Windows with 8 PCs I would switch to Apple.

 

You might want to look at drive's manual too, some have own power saving options and so do some internal "Green" drives.

 

I have a bunch of WD Passports and My Books that never did this with Windows 7, and I have read a lot of people's complaints about this problem that started with Windows 8, and I have used software called "Keep Alive Hard Drive" that was written specifically because of Microsoft's refusal to satisfy their customers by allowing them to disable this boat anchor from their computers. I've seen registry hacks that apparently worked in Win8 to disable this joke that Microsoft has played on us that no longer work in Win10. This is a Win10 problem, not my hard drives.