Hard disk goes slow after idle time

Question

Leaving hard disk idle for sometime reduces it to a snail's speed!

Making it go through a power cycle by Restarting or shutting down the PC restores its speed, but only until its in use. leaving it idle again would cause it to be terribly slow afterwards until next power cycle.

The only way to keep the speed of HDD up is by reading writing to it frequently after power up.

I replaced the HDD with the same model assuming it might have been a defective one but the new hard disk out of sealed packet shows same behaviour since day 1.

I don't know what is causing this.

Hard disk mode : seagate barracuda st1000dm00 .

Installed as secondary hard disk using sata

Answer 1

This means that your power saving preferences are configured to put the hard drive to sleep after a certain amount of time. You need to change that.

Method 1

To prevent the Hard Disk from going to sleep, click on the Battery / Power icon in the taskbar and select More Power options.

In the Control Panel windows which opens, select Change Plan settings for your current Power Plan. In the next window, select Change advanced power settings.

In the Power Options box that opens, click the + sign next to the Hard Disk option. Here you will see the required settings under Turn off hard disk after heading. Change the value to 0.

Click on Apply > OK and exit. This setting will prevent your hard disk from entering the Sleep mode.

Method 2

If you are looking for a freeware to make things easy, try these! NoSleepHD writes an empty text file every few minutes to your external hard disk drive to keep it from going into auto-sleep mode. KeepAliveHD will write an empty text file to your primary as well as secondary drives so as to prevent it from going into automatic standby mode. Mouse Jiggler will prevent Windows computer from going to sleep. Sleep Preventer will prevent your computer from switching to Sleep, Hibernate, Standby mode.