Windows 7: USB selective suspend not working

well the USB selective suspend option I have set to "never" and it dont care, it turns off the drive all the time

I can sit there and the drive will spin up and then turn off every 30-45 min, it spins up and then spins down pretty fast as if it was just work up by me and then it is going back to sleep - I cant figure out what on my computer is waking it up but I dont care I dont want it to even go to sleep in the first place

I dont want the USB drives to ever, ever, EVER! spin down no matter what I dont care about power useage or drive life, I cant effing stand this, when I boot into Linux no problems at all the drive will stay running for hours at a time but stupid effing Windows dont work

Many times we see this behavior on certain machines but not others. It is a hard behavior to pin down.

Sometimes it is the motherboard, the chipset actually, or the chipset driver that is not playing nice with the particular external.
Also it can be the external drive itself, or the data cord, or the USB port that results in a transfer fault. You can test for this by plugging the drive into one of the rear USB ports that are connected to the motherboard, try all the USB ports, try a shorter/thicker data cable.
External drives that do not have a power supply and are powered only by USB are notorious for this. Some work better than others, even within the same model.

I run Windows 7 and my external hard drive will run constantly if I let it, and I have not made any changes to my selective suspend settings from default. I believe your issue lies with your hardware.

The other thing I noticed were your 10 hard drives and RAID array. I can't help but wonder if that might have something to do with it.

I had the same problem with one of my USB drives. I ended up using this to keep it awake. NoSleepHD

well I can narrow it down to 1 thing - the OS - it dont do this running many versions of Linux, but it does with Windows 7 - yea it could be all those other things but at least Linux ignores these problems and keeps it running at all times - also I had Vista Ultimate before this with the same hardware and XP for a little bit also and both Vista and XP had no problem with the drive staying awake but Windows 7 does - the only reason I even run Windows is so I can play PC games other wise I would have nothing to do with this crappy OS I havent found anything in the last 12 years that I can do on Windows that I cant do on Linux except for play PC games and get a virus, lol

but I would be fine if it stayed off or on, now its off and then wakes up every 30-45 min just to go back to sleep after 1-2 min - but again only with Windows 7

I dont think I said anything about having 10 HD's but I only have 2 external ones that are USB, the rest are NAS and internal, way more then 10 HD though thats for sure

Well, do the tests to try and determine what the cause is. That may lead to a solution someone can suggest.

The software that Kado suggests looks like a very good work around.

But if you just wanted to vent about how bad Windows is and how great Linux is then I have noted that.

I like the idea of the software because of how it works by writing a file in a set amount of time to keep it awake - my question is is that the same way that windows "should" keep it awake, like does windows just create a temp file or something and then just keep replacing it to keep dries from spinning down?

or is windows doing what linux does, that is to send the drive a "stay awake" message of sorts using the SMART system built into the drive - like a DMA command not just writing a file

I don't know how Windows does it but I somehow doubt that it would use such a crude (although effective) method.

I dont put it past windows to use such a crude method, they are known for doing things that make no sense or that should have been changed years ago if not decades like the WMF exploit a few years ago

I ran into this problem recently on a New Win 7 64bit PC. I found that it was not sufficient to disable sleep mode for USB in pwer options but I had to check alldrives and it was necessary to additioanlly disable sleep for USB 3 drives