How stop WD Blue Internal HDD going to sleep

[Coup27]

I have just bought a WD Blue 1TB 2.5" SATA HDD, WD10SPCX. I bought the Blue because I did not want it to spin down like the Greens however this thing spins down far more aggressive than my 3TB Green 3.5" I bought a few years ago. Sometimes it takes only a couple of minutes to spin down.

I have contacted WD who say there is no way for the user to disable the spin down.

I did read on a thread on this fourm where a user on this forum found a way to disable the spin down? Not sure if that only applied to external though.

Disabling turn off drives after x minutes in power settings in control panel does nothing.

Does anybody know if there is a way to do this? I am pretty annoyed by this. Had I known they had put this aggressive power management nonsense in the Blue's as well I would have got a Black.

 

[corkyg]

MY HDDs never spin down in Win 7. Control Panel PM setting is "NEVER." Works for me. I use "My Custom Plan."

 

[Coup27]

On the email exchange from WD I quote:

Internal drives are specially constructed for this.

This implies that the firmware on the drive is causing the spin down. Windows is not going to be able to override this and I was hoping that WD would have the foresight to offer customers a utility to disable this if they want to, but obviously not.

 

[corkyg]

I hear you! Check out this link - the very last part of the thread does show some success in stopping the WDC spin down/sleep.

http://community.wd.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/WD7500BPVT-spin-down-time-tool-success/td-p/320407

 

[Coup27]

Thanks for those links. The HDD is not actually mine but in a computer at work so I will have to wait until Monday now before reading those links in more detail and looking at that utility.

 

[Xtrem]

Can you write a script that reads or writes a little bit of data to it every minute?

 

[Elixer]

Odd, I got a blue (bought in 2012), and it never spins down.
Maybe this is a recent change or something.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If this is what WD did to their "Blue" line (auto-spindown like their "Green" drives), then no more WD Blue drives for me!

Edit: Nevermind. OP is talking about a 2.5" (laptop) HDD. Who cares if those spindown, they're supposed to.

 

[Coup27]

Odd, I got a blue (bought in 2012), and it never spins down.
Maybe this is a recent change or something.

It must be. I have 2 500GB blue's from that era and neither spin down and both have worked great. When I built my current personal PC (sig) I wanted a 3TB drive so logically went with the green. This green does spin down but it's not aggressive enough to be annoying.

For the PC which prompted this thread, I did not want a HDD which spun down nor did I want one which was loud so went for the blue. I am annoyed that WD have implemented the spin down technology in the blue's and even more annoyed that they have not officially made a tool available to users to control the spin down.

 

[BFG10K]

This is a notebook drive - I'd fully expect it to spin down.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Can you write a script that reads or writes a little bit of data to it every minute?

That's what I used to do. On a computer with a dozen drives and the power settings configured to spin down drives, I wanted one to remain spinning at all times. I just created a little batch file that wrote a one byte file to the drive, waited a couple seconds, then deleted the file. Then set it up in task scheduler to execute every couple of minutes.

 

[Elixer]

This is a notebook drive - I'd fully expect it to spin down.

D'oh... dunno how I missed that.
Yeah, pretty much all 2.5" notebook drives do that.

The WD Blue that I had was 3.5".

 

[Coup27]

I am aware that it is a 2.5" drive however in the era of mITX cases many people are now using 2.5" drives in desktop PC's.

I may have to go down the batch file idea writing a file to keep it alive as a last resort.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I assume you're experiencing waits for the drive and that's how you're figuring the drive is being spun down. Are you sure the drive spins down, or is it only parking its heads? How long do you wait when you access the drive?

 

[Coup27]

It takes around 2 seconds to access information on the drive. If I don't access the drive for 5 minutes and go into it again, I have to wait 2 seconds again.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I'm not certain how fast 2.5" drives take to spin up, but I would think it's a bit slower than that. What kind of wait time do you see if you explicitly enable drives to spin down in Windows' power settings?



.

 

[C1]

If you were interested in performance (versus power consumption and longevity) then you should have used the 7200 RPM WD Black and on top of that, probably a 3.5".

If the two second delay is such a big deal, then this should work : http://softjock.com/mdis.htm

Shouldnt matter if the drive is internal or external, just select the HDDs you want to maintain active.