Windows – eSATA enclosure powers down SATA HDD after 5 minutes

delockenclosuresesataexternal hard drivewindows 7

I bought a new Delock 3.5″ External Enclosure SATA HDD to USB 2.0 / eSATA for some backup SATA HDD drives that I keep around and everything works just fine, except that if I leave the drive to idle for 5 minutes (precisely 5 minutes), it gets powered down. The problem is that it takes around one minute for it to be powered back up, which completely confuses the operating system (Windows 7 x64) and causes all sorts of errors. One of the drives is a 1TB SATA Western Digital HDD (WD1001FALS-00E3A0).

Because I also tested it with a 500GB drive as well as on a different PC and it had the same behaviour, I will blame it on the enclosure itself. I searched online for similar issues, and even though I have the Intel(R) 5 Series 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller, disabling the HIPM / DIPM (AHCI Link Power Management) features does not change anything.

I used to have a Vantec NexStar CX enclosure for the same type of HDD, which I also connected to the same laptop via eSATA and it did not have this behavior.

Is there any way to disable this power management "feature"? I wasn't able to find any instructions from the manufacturer of the enclosure.

Best regards,
Mihai Todor

Best Answer

I have had the same problem in the past with "green" drives. My solution was to create a .bat file that copied one file from my C:\ drive to my external drive which was Z:\ and schedule that .bat file to run every 5 minutes in the task scheduler.

Put something similar to this in your .bat file.

xcopy /s "C:\some_file.txt" "Z:\some_file.txt"
del "Z:\some_file.txt"

Doing what I have suggested will cause the external hard drive to never spool down, but every 5 minutes when the .bat file runs you will see the a command prompt pop up. The solution to that is to create a hidden user account and schedule the task to run using that user account.

Instructions on creating a hidden user account can be found here.

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