Laptop secondary HDD sleep

Hi, my laptop has a primary system SSD and a secondary data HDD.
If I try to let the HDD go to sleep it will always be woken up from time to time. Indexing is disabled, system protection is disabled for that drive, it is set as an excluded folder in Windows Defender (scheduled scans are disabled in scheduled tasks too), no fonts are stored on that drive; the only activity that wakes it up seems to be "System" processes for NFTS. Sometimes I can hear HDD activity without anything bein shown in Resource Monitor.

I have now tried revoSleed and the "Sleep" function works fine, though the drive will still be "randomly" woken up. If I try to check the "Offline" option too (as recommended), an error message will appear saying "Access denied, maybe there are files open on the drive".

I don't think this is really about revoSleep, rather it's about Windows. From Resource Monitor, no file is being accessed on the HDD when I try to put it to sleep, even though revoSleep doesn't think so. When I try to put the drive to sleep+offline, immediately I can see System Volume Information Fve2 activity on that drive.

Perhaps Windows considers my secondary, data only HDD as a system drive even though it shouldn't? Maybe there is something like that which I'm missing?

Thanks to anyone who will try to help :)

Open the Command Prompt by typing cmd.exe into Start Menu, right-click on Cmd.exe, and open it as an administrator.


Within the Command Prompt type:

Execute below command to identify the event or device that is responsible for the last waking process. Once the results are shown, check the “Instance Path:” to see where it originated from (the USB or PCI port for instance) and look under “Type:” for the nature of the cause, typically a device or a wake timer.

FreeBooter said:

Open the Command Prompt by typing cmd.exe into Start Menu, right-click on Cmd.exe, and open it as an administrator.


Within the Command Prompt type:

Execute below command to identify the event or device that is responsible for the last waking process. Once the results are shown, check the “Instance Path:” to see where it originated from (the USB or PCI port for instance) and look under “Type:” for the nature of the cause, typically a device or a wake timer.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your reply. I've waited the HDD to wake up, executed the command and got these results



I'm sorry it's in Italian, though I think it's apparent I cannot really see anything :/

Is it possible to list wake timers in some way?

Has Windows been reinstalled? The mention of it possibly being a "System" drive would have me looking in the BIOS for anything about RAID and/or removing that HDD and trying to boot with only the SSD connected. Had that happen once where Windows picked up the AHCI/RAID setting in the BIOS and removing the second drive later broke the boot process. Something about the Sleep settings may be involved with both drives, I try to stay away from Sleep and Hibernation.

Berton said:

Has Windows been reinstalled? The mention of it possibly being a "System" drive would have me looking in the BIOS for anything about RAID and/or removing that HDD and trying to boot with only the SSD connected. Had that happen once where Windows picked up the AHCI/RAID setting in the BIOS and removing the second drive later broke the boot process. Something about the Sleep settings may be involved with both drives, I try to stay away from Sleep and Hibernation.

Click to expand...

The OS does not recognise the HDD as a system drive, Windows is installed on the SSD as intended. The HDD being seen as a system drive is just me not understanding how on earth there is not a way to make Windows leave this poor drive alone. Should be just storage

When your computer goes to sleep, current memory is written to a file. Apparently that file is being kept on your data drive. When the computer wakes up, it reads that file back into active memory and your computer is then at the state it was in before going to sleep.

The confusion is that the computer is what goes to sleep, not the drive.

TraderGary said:

When your computer goes to sleep, current memory is written to a file. Apparently that file is being kept on your data drive. When the computer wakes up, it reads that file back into active memory and your computer is then at the state it was in before going to sleep.

The confusion is that the computer is what goes to sleep, not the drive.

Click to expand...

No, I am NOT talking about the PC's sleep/standby, I am talking about HDD spin-down

OK. I've never heard of putting a "drive" to sleep. I'll watch the thread and see if I learn something new.

TraderGary said:

OK. I've never heard of putting a "drive" to sleep. I'll watch the thread and see if I learn something new.

Click to expand...

Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

fruh said:

Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle in Windows 10

Click to expand...

Interesting. It's been years since I've had a "spinner" HDD. I really don't foresee ever having one again.

The article says to ignore if you have an SSD. You mentioned somewhere that you might replace your HDD with an SSD. Maybe it's time?

I've just found out that in Disk Management there is no option for putting my secondary HDD offline, which might be correlated to the fact that revoSleep can't put it offline too.
The HDD in Disk Management is labelled just as a basic data partition (it is not labelled as a boot partition or whatever).

Is it possible that the online/offline functionality is missing because the HDD is considered special in some way by the OS?

To work around the issue of revoSleep 0.4.0 no longer working correctly with many/most HDDs on Windows 10/11, I use revoSleep in combination with HDDScan 4.1 for Windows. Here's how.

Assuming you have installed HDDScan in a folder C:\tools\HDDScan, put this line in the file
C:\Program Files\revoSleep v0.4\beforeSleep.bat:
In addition to this, put these lines in the file
C:\Program Files\revoSleep v0.4\afterSleep.bat:
Finally, in revoSleep, after you click on Show Details for the drive in question, make sure that both the Offline checkbox and the Deactivate checkbox are checked, and that the Sleep checkbox is unchecked. Next, when you check the checkbox in front of the drive and you click on Sleep selected, the drive should fall asleep in a few seconds, and should no longer get inadvertently woken up by Windows.

I will explain how this trick works. beforeSleep.bat is run by revoSleep each time before it puts a drive to sleep. However, because you have unchecked the Sleep checkbox like how I described, revoSleep doesn't actually put the drive to sleep. Instead, what happens is that the command in the batchfile sets the APM Idle Timer of the drive to 1, which is the smallest possible value that my 8TB Seagate Desktop HDD (old model─ST8000DM002) can support. This effectively causes the drive to fall asleep by itself a few seconds after revoSleep has finished unmounting and deactivating the drive.

To find out the smallest possible Idle Timer value that your drive can support, in HDDScan, select the drive from the pulldown list at the top and choose TOOLS | FEATURES. There's an Idle Timer slider there, and an input box to manually enter the value so you can experiment with this setting and click on the Spindown button to find out how the drive behaves in this regard. Changing this value to 0 should either disable the timer or make it fall asleep after a certain specific maximum time period has expired─this behavior may depend on the hardware design of the drive you have also.

The batch code I wrote in afterSleep.bat is to change the value to 0 after revoSleep has successfully woken the drive up again and the drive has been mounted again successfully. (The HDDScan command fails if it tries to change the value before the drive is properly mounted, so that's why my batch code has a wait loop in it.)

hdmi said:

In addition to this, put these lines in the file
C:\Program Files\revoSleep v0.4\afterSleep.bat:

Code:

@ECHO OFF
SET c=15
:FindDrive
IF EXIST "%~1\" GOTO Mounted
TIMEOUT /T 2
SET /A c-=1
IF %c%==0 EXIT
GOTO FindDrive
:Mounted
"C:\tools\HDDScan\HDDScan.exe" %3 -PM 0

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Thank you a lot for your guide :)

Sorry for the late reply, I have now spent some time learning stuff about what you've described.
Since I've noticed that the default APM value shown for my HDD is 128, do you think I should edit your script to bring the APM value from 1 back to 128 rather than back to 0?
I'd say that the value to edit in your script is "-PM 0" (last line). Also, which value in your script should I edit if APM=1 doesn't work for my drive? I don't really know the code you wrote (though your explanation was perfectly clear)

Thanks again for your time

fruh said:

Thank you a lot for your guide :)

Sorry for the late reply, I have now spent some time learning stuff about what you've described.
Since I've noticed that the default APM value shown for my HDD is 128, do you think I should edit your script to bring the APM value from 1 back to 128 rather than back to 0?
I'd say that the value to edit in your script is "-PM 0" (last line). Also, which value in your script should I edit if APM=1 doesn't work for my drive? I don't really know the code you wrote (though your explanation was perfectly clear)

Thanks again for your time

Click to expand...

Yeah, change the 0 in "-PM 0" to whatever the value that makes it behave how you prefer it─go by trial and error if necessary to find out how exactly this value affects the idle timer for the drive you have. The only thing that matters in this regard is that, if we can assume that a value of 1 translates to 1 second of idle time, then you probably don't want it to fall back alseep 1 second after you tell revoSleep to wake it up for you, so that's why I use the command in afterSleep.bat to set it to 0. It is very well possible that changing this 0 to 128 will have no effect in any way whatsoever. AFAIK normally, 0 means that the idle timer is set to disabled, but green (i.e. "eco-friendly") drives are known to fall asleep all by theirself after some period of inactivity regardless of whether you try to disable the idle timer in the Power Management options.

On a side note, I was wrong about the idle timer being under APM (Advanced Power Management). Instead, it is under PM (Power Management), as the "PM" in "-PM 0" clearly suggests. But anyway. If, by chance, you also want to prevent a drive from falling asleep and disabling the idle timer doesn't let you achieve that goal, then you could always decide to use KeepAliveHD.