selective suspend cycle time

I'm trying to get a handle on the sleep timeout of the USB port to which I've connected an external USB-powered HD. With 'Power Options > ... Advanced Power Settings > ...USB selective suspend setting' set to Enabled, the external drive does power down to sleep mode, but, as best I can determine, with a timeout of ~10 minutes, irrespective of the general power settings (e.g., internal HD power down:Never, sleep: Never). But I can't find what actually sets the timeout of the USB port. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics\Performance\Suspend gives lots of USB timings, but these are in ms, nowhere near the minutes I observe.)

Does anyone know what controls the USB port timeouts and how to vary or at least verify them?

I think with External USB it's in the firmware. I had Seagates where I could download a program to control it. I set it to never spin down. Also even with some USB docking stations, namely Sharkoon USB 3.0 it would spin down if not accessed every few minutes. I wrote a program DriveAlive, to create or delete a dummy file every 5 minutes to keep it from spinning down.

You can download DriveAlive from my page here:

Faves Downloads

MilesAhead said:

I think with External USB it's in the firmware. I had Seagates where I could download a program to control it. I set it to never spin down. Also even with some USB docking stations, namely Sharkoon USB 3.0 it would spin down if not accessed every few minutes. I wrote a program DriveAlive, to create or delete a dummy file every 5 minutes to keep it from spinning down.

You can download DriveAlive from my page here:

Faves Downloads

Click to expand...

Thanks, that makes sense - I'll try to confirm that the timeout is set in firmware with WD support. My issue is to have the ext. drive spin down reliably - no sense running it at speed when it's idle.

Your software list is interesting, I'll check it out more carefully when I get a chance.

Things seem to vary quite a bit. My Seagate external seemed very reliable. Once I set the firmware not to spin down I didn't have to think about it. But drives in the Sharkoon dock, even though I kept it from spinning down, don't seem to sync well. I make a point of syncing with SysInternals sync.exe. My SIIG docking stations don't spin down. They have a cooling fan. They seem very reliable afa not getting corrupted files. Seems to be no way to tell exactly what will happen other than work them and watch.

Another factor for me is I use Everything Search which watches the NTFS drives in the docks for changes. I have to kill that program, sync, then power off the docks to make sure I don't have any lingering data corruption. Still the SIIG USB 3 stuff is fast!!

Yes, this gets curiouser and curiouser. By keeping an eye on the HD while I was working today I found that it wakes from sleep, apparently randomly, in response to changes in the machine's state, and not necessarily to USB calls. There's no discernible rhyme or reason as to what events cause the spin-up. Then it will spin down again within anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes unless some other change pushes it up again. The question is whether enabling this behavior will prolong the life of the drive much more than just leaving it on all the time. But at least it minimizes the vibration of the full-speed drive. I'll be very interested to hear from WD tech support. Sigh.

Have you tried watching with Task Manager or Process Explorer

I've noticed esp. on Vista before SP1 my HD was used more by the machine than me. It look me a long time to quiet it down. I found many processes were opening every file on all my drives, such as Windows Media Player, and others to index my drive content. I turned all indexing off.

Even my external drive was being scanned for media files. Really absurd default settings.

If this is what's happening you should notice a bunch of items in Process Explorer like Explorer.exe file open, all scrolling up one after another.

MilesAhead said:

Have you tried watching with Task Manager or Process Explorer

I've noticed esp. on Vista before SP1 my HD was used more by the machine than me. It look me a long time to quiet it down. I found many processes were opening every file on all my drives, such as Windows Media Player, and others to index my drive content. I turned all indexing off.

Even my external drive was being scanned for media files. Really absurd default settings.

If this is what's happening you should notice a bunch of items in Process Explorer like Explorer.exe file open, all scrolling up one after another.

Click to expand...

Yes, Vista's internal bookkeeping is way too obsessive. I'll turn indexing off by and by as an experiment, but for now I find it useful, and so will put up with the waking up of the USB drive at every little change in state. At least the drive does spin down in 15-30 mins if Vista leaves it alone.

Thanks for the pointer to Process Explorer. Looks like it'll tell me what's going on, but there won't be much to do about it unless I want to degrade the performance of Vista. I guess unneeded disk activity is the price one pays for an otherwise well-running OS.

I index my drive then turn it off. Search still works fast.