How to Keep My Seagate Hard Drive From Going to Sleep
Seagate manufactures both internal and external hard drives, and their sleep modes can be managed in different ways. The hard drive is one of the top energy consumers among computer-hardware components, and Windows operating systems support options to reduce power consumption. Internal hard drives are typically turned off and stop spinning ("sleep" mode) after a certain period of system inactivity. However, the system usually takes longer to come back when the hard drive's sleep mode is activated. Furthermore, turning off hard drives may result in failure of some constantly running applications.
Windows includes options to turn off sleep modes for internal hard drives, and external hard drives can be managed using a utility program.
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Instructions
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In Windows Vista
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Log in to an administrator account and click the "Start" button in the lower left corner of the screen.
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Click "Control Panel" and then "Systems and Maintenance."
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Click on "Power Options." Open "Change plan settings" under your current power plan. Note "Radio button" is selected for the current plan.
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Click "Change advanced power settings." Expand the entry "hard drive" by clicking on the "+" sign.
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Click on "+" to expand the entry "Turn off hard disk after." Select "Never" for this option and click "OK."
In Windows XP
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Log in to an administrator account and click the "Start" button in the lower left corner of the screen.
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Click "Control Panel" and switch to the "Category" view on the left panel. Then click on "Performance and Maintenance."
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Click on "Performance and Maintenance" and open "Power Options." The select the tab "Power Schemes."
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Using drop-down list, set the option "Never" for "Turn off hard drives." Click "OK."
Using "NoSleepHD" for External Hard Drives
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Click on the "NoSleepHD program" link in Resources. Click "I Agree" and save the program (as a zip file) on your computer.
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Open a folder where you have saved the file using Windows Explorer. Right-click on the zip file and select "Extract All." Then click "Extract" to get the program file "NoSleepHD v1.0.exe."
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Double-click on the program (.exe) file to execute NoSleepHD.
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Click "Select External Hard Drive" in the Program menu and choose your Seagate external hard drive.
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Choose "10 minutes" under the option "Write File every" and click "Start NoSleep Mode." The program will write an empty string every 10 minutes to the Seagate hard drive and prevent it from going into sleep mode.
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