Prevent External USB HDD Disk Sleeping

If you want to wake up your drives, query the SMART info.

For PowerShell:
Run this from a .vbs on your Task Scheduler every N minutes set to run under the SYSTEM account (Administrative privileges)

Get-PhysicalDisk -ErrorAction Ignore | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter -ErrorAction Ignore

Windows/Linux/macOS will not cache the SMART info and the on-board controller will always report it and guarantee spin-up of the disk if it is able to do so.

5 Likes