By default, Windows will automatically turn off your hard drive after 20 minutes of idle time. This can help save energy and extend a laptop’s battery life. When you try to access a hard disk that is turned off, you will notice a slight delay for the drive to spin back up. Constantly spinning down/up can reduce the life of the hard disk, so I recommend you leave the drive spinning all the time, or set the drive to turn off after a longer period (one or two hours) of inactivity. In this tutorial we’ll show you 2 methods to prevent Windows from turning off hard drive after idle.

Method 1: Prevent Turning off Hard Drive via Power Options

1. Press the Windows logo key + R to open the Run box. Type the following and hit Enter to open the Power Options window.
   control.exe powercfg.cpl,,3

   

2. Expand Hard disk and Turn off hard disk after, change the value to 0 and click OK.

   

   Your hard drive will never fall into sleep after idle.

Method 2: Prevent Turning off Hard Drive via Command Prompt or PowerShell

1. Open the Command Prompt or PowerShell as administrator.

   

2. Run the following commands one by one, replacing “seconds_of_idle” with 0.

   

   powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e seconds_of_idle

   powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e seconds_of_idle

3. When it’s done, your hard drive should keep spinning all the time and it never goes to sleep after idle.

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