Sata Drives Slow to Open

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I have 4 secondary SATA drives in addition to my OS(W10) drive. 2 are SSD and 2 are HDD. It has always been my experience that when I click on a short cut for any of these secondary drives they immediately open.
Recently, I have found that if I have not opened anything on these drives (both SSDs & HDDs) for lets say 30 minutes or more, they are slow to open ( 15 or 20 seconds). Once they open everything is fast as it should be. This lead me to believe that they may be going to sleep. I made sure my advanced power settings are set to never sleep.
Could there be another issue here aside from sleep ?
Has anyone experienced this issue ?
OS = W10/21h1-Updated 10/28/21

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I’m another with the same issue, but I don’t have a solution. One of my computers has an SSD OS drive and a separate sata SSD data drive. There is a delay after double-clicking a desktop shortcut to a folder on the data SSD. It does seem to be a ‘waking up’ sort of thing. This happens to be a Win 10 Home install, 21H1, last updated October like yours.

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bashbish

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It’s not the sleep setting causing your problem, you need to change the turn off timer setting so the drives won’t power down when inactive for too long.

System > Power & sleep > Additional power settings > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Turn off hard drive after > Plugged in

As you can see, I have mine set to never power down since, unlike HDD’s which use quite a bit of power to simply keep the discs spinning, SSD’s don’t consume very much power when not in use.

Of course, YMMV.

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bashbish, Paul, Seattle27

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Thanks ~ the delay is gone.

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bashbish

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Hello alejr

Thanks for your attempt to help. You seemed to have helped seatle27. Unfortunately, I have already put a zero (Never) under Hard drive and I still have the issue.

 

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Check your PCI Express > Link State Power Management setting.

To avoid possible latency issues with attached devices (such as your drives being slow to respond) it should be Off.

You can also look for an “Aggressive Link Power Management for SATA controller” setting in your BIOS (it’s called “Aggressive SATA Sleep” on AMD motherboards) and make sure it’s disabled.

BTW, I’ve been on 21H1 since April and have never experienced this problem so it’s shouldn’t be related to you upgrading to that version of Win10.

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bashbish

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Did this begin immediately after the update to 21H1?

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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alejr

PCI Express > Link State Power Management setting has been set to off. My BIOS remains as it has been for quite awhile so I decided not too mess with it for now.Thanks again

 

John W,

I have noticed it happening for past few days. I updated to 21h1 end of august. Last cumulative update was 10/28.

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Your symptoms sure “sound” like the drives are entering power saving mode and my first suggestion should have fixed it like it did for seatle27.

I suggested the others because they also “might” cause your symptoms.

Since none of those are causing your issue, I’d suspect you’ve got a program running in the background that’s accessing your drives that doesn’t kick off until they’ve have been idle for a certain period of time.

The delay you’re experiencing before the drive reacts would be the time needed for that program to reach a “safe state” before it shuts down whatever it’s doing with the drive and releases it so you can access it.

Not sure exactly what Win10 program might do this (maybe automatic defrag?) but…

• after waiting the amount of time it usually takes for the problem to crop up

Open task manager before you try to access a drive and take note of what programs are running.

Do the same after you’ve access a drive and then compare the results.

If a particular program is what’s causing your problem, this should help you pinpoint it.

Good luck!

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My memory of things is not as good as it could be. After monitoring the times this happens the last 24 hours, I realize its a lot less than I thought it was.

I believe you may be right. The programs I believe may be doing this are Malwarebytes and/or  Avast AV. If they are scanning a particular drive when I try to open it, there is a delay.

 

Thanks

 

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To test this, temporarily disable real-time scanning on your security apps. Then enable one at a time.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Problem resolved. Solution Unknown

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