Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Can't get ANY of my 8 Hard Drives to spin down in windows 10

Mar 29, 2017 6:30PM PDT

I have a windows 10 machine I use for media streaming and file sharing at my house. None of the hard drives will spin down, even though I set them up to in power options in windows (5 min no activity). I updated the UEFI on the motherboard and updated the windows drivers as well. Motherboard is ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0. CPU is AMD FX 4300 Quad core.

The drives would spin down when I was running windows 7. I use Hard Drive Sentinel to monitor the drives temps and see if the drive is active or not.

As you can imagine, this is producing a fair amount of heat in my small home office. I really hope someone can help.

I do have an addon card for 2 of the drives (don't have specs handy) but doubting that is the cause since NONE of the drives spin down.

YES - I have disabled windows indexing.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Clarification Request
Can't get ANY of my 8 Hard Drives to spin down in windows 10
Mar 30, 2017 5:28PM PDT

When I said that I had updated the UEFI, that is the equivalent of a BIOS.

It's odd that it doesn't have any WAKE commands. The whole power management is a bit vague.


Thanks for the google link, but I have read all those pages. I would never post a question without looking for the answer first.

I used to be a systems builder (for over a decade). When I run into a problem there is no one for me to ask locally. I'm the guy everyone comes to. I was hoping someone here would have some ideas.

It sure is strange.

I even watched taskmanger and could see that nothing is accessing 6 of the 8 drives.

- Collapse -
there are power settings in UEFI program also
Mar 30, 2017 5:33PM PDT

Perhaps windows 10 has a problem taking that function over from the UEFI/BIOS.

- Collapse -
What I meant
Mar 30, 2017 6:00PM PDT

Is that this area doesn't have any new things I didn't find there. If I was to work this I'd try it after I had a current BIOS and motherboard drivers installed. If that failed I'd try a drive on a PC that I know this works on.

- Collapse -
Clarification Request
Are any of the drives WD Red drives?
Mar 30, 2017 6:08PM PDT
- Collapse -
Answer
Nothing new to add.
Mar 29, 2017 6:34PM PDT
- Collapse -
Answer
turn off "wake" functions in the BIOS
Mar 29, 2017 7:15PM PDT

especially "WOL" which is "wake on LAN"