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I bought a new Delock 3.5″ External Enclosure SATA HDD to USB 2.0 / eSATA for some backup SATA HDD drives that I keep around and everything works just fine, except that if I leave the drive to idle for 5 minutes (precisely 5 minutes), it gets powered down. The problem is that it takes around one minute for it to be powered back up, which completely confuses the operating system (Windows 7 x64) and causes all sorts of errors. One of the drives is a 1TB SATA Western Digital HDD (WD1001FALS-00E3A0).
Because I also tested it with a 500GB drive as well as on a different PC and it had the same behaviour, I will blame it on the enclosure itself. I searched online for similar issues, and even though I have the Intel(R) 5 Series 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller, disabling the HIPM / DIPM (AHCI Link Power Management) features does not change anything.
I used to have a Vantec NexStar CX enclosure for the same type of HDD, which I also connected to the same laptop via eSATA and it did not have this behavior.
Is there any way to disable this power management "feature"? I wasn't able to find any instructions from the manufacturer of the enclosure.
Best regards, Mihai Todor
device manager and properties on the drive should allow you to fine tune its power behavior. – Ramhound – 2014-01-12T21:46:32.950
@Ramhound I'm afraid I don't know which setting you're referring to. I don't see any power settings over there for drives. Could you please provide a screen shot or some relevant link? – Mihai Todor – 2014-01-13T09:29:12.600
i'm sorry, have all of you alluded to the fact it takes 1 minute for this hard drive to power backup? this is obviously not normal, it should take like 2-3 seconds...TOPS. – Sickest – 2014-01-19T21:58:45.000
@Sickest I think this is due to the fact that the drive is not unmounted when it gets powered off and then Windows is probably doing something silly instead of sending the wake up command. – Mihai Todor – 2014-01-20T08:55:27.107