Hi Everyone I have a lot of mechanical drives in my PC and every time I restart, Windows 10 puts all the drives to sleep (platters stops spinning). As a consequence, the BIOS has to "wait" for every drive in a sequence to spin up before it continues to boot (after every restart). This takes very long. It's faster to shut down and power back on again because all the drives will spin-up at the same time and by the time the BIOS reads them they're already in the "ready" state. But it annoys me, I want to be able to restart without waiting forever for all the drives to spin back up one by one again... Note: Windows 7 does not do this (Fedora 41 doesn't do it either). This is NOT hardware related... Happens on my other computer as well. My current setup is MSI x99s, Xeon E5-2687W V4 (and a bunch of mechanical sata drives). The mechanical disks are only being used for storage, my main drive is an NVME. Is there some setting, maybe in Group Policy (I have Win 10 Enterprise) that I can change to stop this?
For your particular case, what are the effects of turning off fast boot in the Windows power and sleep settings? Open Control Panel: Press Windows + R to open the Run dialog; Type control and press Enter. Navigate to the Control Panel and select Power Options: In the Control Panel, click on "Hardware and Sound"; Then, click on "Power Options". Choose "Choose what the power buttons do"; Click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable"; Under "Shutdown settings" uncheck the "Turn on fast startup" box; Save Changes: Click on "Save changes" at the bottom of the page. My two cents. Notes: Disabling Fast Startup can lead to longer boot times, as the system will perform a full shutdown and startup process instead of a hybrid boot. Without Fast Startup, Windows will fully initialize all drivers and services during boot, which may help resolve issues related to hardware not being recognized or functioning properly. Some users may experience better compatibility with certain hardware or software, particularly if they encounter problems with devices not working correctly after waking from sleep. Disabling Fast Startup allows users to access BIOS or UEFI settings more easily during boot, as the system will not skip the initial boot sequence. If you use hybrid sleep, turning off Fast Startup may affect how your system manages sleep states, potentially leading to different power management behavior.
@NewEraCracker - My "Fast Boot" is already disabled. Enabling it does not make any difference as the OS issues a "standby" command to the hard drives upon a restart. Microsoft seem to have not documented this when they decided to add this to the OS and therefore it seems like there's no way to switch that off for now...