Prevent Hard Disk from going to sleep in Windows 8 | 7

In this post, we will see how you can prevent your primary, secondary or external hard disk drive or USB from going to sleep on a Windows 8 | 7 computer. You do not want your external hard disk going to sleep and yet you find that at times it goes into the Sleep mode. Sleep is a power-saving state that lets you quickly resume full-power operation when you want to start working again.

Prevent Hard Disk from going to sleep

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.

Prevent External Hard Drive from going to sleep

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.