HDD standby in Windows 10

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by wavecat, Nov 4, 2020.

  1. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    Every time my monitor display goes off (after a scheduled downtime), Windows wakes all my hard drives from standby. How do I stop Windows 10 from waking disks all the time?
    P.S. Windows 7 does not wake up disks after turning off the display.
     
  2. angel1610

    angel1610 MDL Member

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    Go to control panel/power options/advance option under hd and set to 0.
     
  3. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    Are you kidding? I don't want the disks spinning all the time.
     
  4. xteam

    xteam MDL Novice

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    maybe it the AV trying to scan while the PC is idle? and not the windows
     
  5. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    I don't have a third party antivirus. I tried to disable the built-in antivirus. Nothing changed. I think this is another stupidity from Microsoft. Check with yourself what I wrote about. You can check if the disk is in standby mode using the following utility: sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/
    smartctl -n standby /dev/sdd - just check.
    smartctl -s standby,now /dev/sdd - put into standby mode.
     
  6. kaljukass

    kaljukass MDL Guru

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    #6 kaljukass, Nov 4, 2020
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2021
    Replace the HDD with the SSD and it will never spin again. There, only electrons rotate around the nucleus.
    But well, they probably realized it was a joke.
    Maybe you would say what a computer it is, namely things are a little different if you have a tower and then if it's a lapatop.
    But it may be true, that the settings are not the best or at they are at all incorrect. Also may be that some software need the spinning HDD, etc.
    But the worse story is that if you already hear the HDD spinning, there have been happened something very bad with it.
     
  7. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    Replace the HDD with the SSD? Why write such nonsense?
    Ryzen 1800X, Chipset x370, 3 HDD, 2 SSD.
    Again. Check if you have this problem.
    If you have no hard disks in your system and you have nothing to say in essence - do not write.
     
  8. kaljukass

    kaljukass MDL Guru

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    I am very happy with your knowledge and wisdom.
    It's so good to meet such smart people. But your behavior is, to put it mildly, very bad.
     
  9. Enthousiast

    Enthousiast MDL Tester

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  10. Carlos Detweiller

    Carlos Detweiller MDL Spinning Tortoise

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    But also no spindowns. Setting HDD standby to 0 means they will spin continuously.
     
  11. Enthousiast

    Enthousiast MDL Tester

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    Nothing is spinning here, except my wife;)
     
  12. Carlos Detweiller

    Carlos Detweiller MDL Spinning Tortoise

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    We are talking about spinning rust here. SSDs of course don't spin, but 6TB SSDs are still a bit... expensive. The data capacities I need still have to be covered by mechanical stuff.
     
  13. Enthousiast

    Enthousiast MDL Tester

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    My disk setup and taskmanager shows 1 ssd (system disk) and 2 hdd's, none of the hdds are running/spinning when not used.

    Or is that setting only for the system disk?
     
  14. Carlos Detweiller

    Carlos Detweiller MDL Spinning Tortoise

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  15. TigTex

    TigTex MDL Senior Member

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    It's explorer.exe that wakes up the HDD from time to time. I used to have a windows 10 file server and a simple batch file that kills explorer.exe on boot. Doing that, the hard disks would never wake up on idle every half an hour or so.
    It's a good idea to automatically turn off hard disks if you are not accessing them because it might prevent data loss because of a head crash (in case of an accident), it will save the motor bearings and also reduces power usage.
    Avoid setting "never" on the power options unless you require your hard disk to always be ready to use without any delays or if you are constantly hearing the hdd spinning up and down.
     
  16. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    That is the problem. Something wakes up the disks when the monitor display is scheduled to turn off. Not even a couple of seconds pass, the disks wake up immediately as soon as the screen goes out.
     
  17. EXO56

    EXO56 MDL Member

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    Scheduled tasks, Windows Update, Power Management of some hardware (not only HDD's)...
    All those things are waking up idle systems.
     
  18. Carlos Detweiller

    Carlos Detweiller MDL Spinning Tortoise

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    Plus, there's a feature called "PM Wake Timers", even able to resume from sleep or hibernation states. Wake Timers can be configured through powercfg.exe.
     
  19. wavecat

    wavecat MDL Novice

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    It seems that the problem with periodic (about once an hour) waking up of all hard drives has been resolved. It seems (need more time to check). I just disabled "Background apps."
    But another similar problem remained. Almost every time I delete a file / files or folder / folders through Windows Explorer, all hard drives wake up. I disabled moving files to trash for all drives. Thus, the files are deleted immediately. If I use the command line to delete, then this problem is not.