External Hard Drives constantly sleeping despite all suggestions. Please help...

Does this only occur when the drives are plugged into your Dell XPS system? For example, if you plug the drives into a different computer, do they work as expected? If so, perhaps we can try to find what the difference between the two systems is.

Hi Shawn,

Thanks so much for the care in replying. I don't have another PC to try it on but could ask a friend. Theoretically though, if the second PC didn't create the same issue, I'd be looking at all the same PC setting on the second computer listed in my original post. With all the settings on my current Dell (don't allow sleep, sleep never, USB suspend disabled, etc), the drives shouldn't be sleeping. So why are they still going to sleep? I've done every single things every thread has recommended. What am I missing??

Daniel

It sounds like you've really covered your basis of options to check. One place I haven't seen mentioned is your BIOS / UEFI options, that could have some power throttling settings.

If there is a specific suggestion you can give me, I would be happy to consider it. Can you let me know exactly what I should check to see if it is something I can change and how I can change it? I am not at all savvy with BIOS and am nervous to work within this so I'd appreciate specific guidance. But trying to edit 4k videos when your drives sleep every 30 seconds is absolutely killing me. I would be SO appreciative to anyone who can help me.

Thank you.

With every BIOS being different it's hard to say with absolute certainty, but it wouldn't hurt anything to look at it and see if, under the Storage or USB section (if such sections exist) there were any options about turning off drives or saving power or such.

Thanks again, Shawn. The average person posting here for help, like me, likely doesn't know how to look in the BIOS to search for anything, let alone something that might not exist. I am very grateful for your reply and attempted assistance. Thank you so very much.

If anyone else reading this has additional suggestions on what other options might exist, I'd be SO grateful for your help.

Daniel

I wouldn't mind guiding you. You can't break anything by looking, and it's not a cryptic difficult thing to check. If you aren't sure just ask. Or your system instruction manual will also tell you how to reach it (that's why your system has a user manual, just for this very situation). Don't be afraid to try new things.

Your system manufacturer provides a manual on their website to make it easy to lookup the instructions.

This works:

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Thank you Exapplerep. My drive shuts down at 30 seconds. This will only work for a minimum of 1 minute. As well, I'd love to solve this issue with out having to write to the drive every 20 seconds.

Thank you so much for taking the time to try and help.