eSATA enclosure powers down SATA HDD after 5 minutes

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

Mihai Todor

Posted 2014-01-12T20:20:33.907

Reputation: 115

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

Answers

I have had the same problem in the past with "green" drives. My solution was to create a .bat file that copied one file from my C:\ drive to my external drive which was Z:\ and schedule that .bat file to run every 5 minutes in the task scheduler.

Put something similar to this in your .bat file.

xcopy /s "C:\some_file.txt" "Z:\some_file.txt"
del "Z:\some_file.txt"

Doing what I have suggested will cause the external hard drive to never spool down, but every 5 minutes when the .bat file runs you will see the a command prompt pop up. The solution to that is to create a hidden user account and schedule the task to run using that user account.

Instructions on creating a hidden user account can be found here.

ubiquibacon

Posted 2014-01-12T20:20:33.907

Reputation: 7 287

Not bad. I don't like such workarounds, but it does the trick and I found an utility which achieves the same thing without having to mess around with hidden accounts. Why didn't I think of it? :))

– Mihai Todor – 2014-01-21T22:18:04.777

@Mihai Todor Good find! – ubiquibacon – 2014-01-22T00:58:41.123

Power management does nothing? There are advanced options for disk suspending... Typically disk is turned off after a period of time (all of them), for example: after 5, 10 or 15 minutes.

pbies

Posted 2014-01-12T20:20:33.907

Reputation: 1 633

I have set "Turn off disk after" to "never" under "advanced power settings". Is there any other place where I should change this? – Mihai Todor – 2014-01-17T15:21:57.293

Eventually some dedicated driver/software for the specific PC/laptop (motherboard exactly). Maybe there is some power management app? – pbies – 2014-01-17T15:25:13.597

I didn't think of that, but, after digging in their downloads section, it looks like my Dell Inspiron N5010 does not have any app which provides such power settings :( – Mihai Todor – 2014-01-18T02:04:18.963

If also there are no such settings in BIOS, there is possibility that the enclosure is factory-set to turn off after 5 minutes. You would not be able to change that. Eventually you can try other enclosure or try to change firmware in the owned one (very small chance that this is possible). – pbies – 2014-01-18T16:39:48.417

Sadly, I don't have any such setting in BIOS (which is extremely minimalistic anyways). I'll probably have to get a different enclosure :( – Mihai Todor – 2014-01-20T08:53:26.880