To avoid that after a few minutes of inactivity the PC deactivates the disks, let's see how to prevent the primary hard disk and also any external hard disks and USB sticks from going to sleep mode . Sleep mode is a power saving mode useful on laptops when running on battery power, but which can slow down work on normal computers.
When the computer goes to sleep, the internal and external disk is deactivated and starts working again only when you press a button on the keyboard or move the mouse.
To prevent the external hard disk from being automatically disabled and going to sleep in sleep mode, click the battery icon in the system tray and select More power saving options .
If there is no battery icon, go to the Control Panel and click on the Power Options .
In the window that opens select one of the combinations, perhaps the balanced one and click on Change combination settings and in the next window, press on Change advanced energy saving settings .
At this point locate the item Hard disk and press on + to find " disable hard disk after " and put 0 to completely disable the deactivation of the main hard disk.
Press Apply and then OK to exit.
As for external disks and USB sticks, to prevent them from turning off automatically, you should, from the same list of advanced settings, USB settings by disabling selective suspension .
To make things easier, however, it is better to use a tool called NoSleepHD that prevents the deactivation of external disks by writing an empty text file every few minutes.
The computer will always think that the disk is in use and will not put the hard disk to sleep even for a second.
A similar tool is KeepAliveHD which also works with the main internal drive to prevent Windows from turning off external drives.
To these tools we can also add:
- Mouse Jiggler to keep your Windows PC awake at all times .
- Sleep Preventer to prevent the computer from shutting down, going into standby or hibernation
