It is always a good idea to save electricity or battery power when not in use. PowerCFG is a command-line utility in Windows which allows changing different options of power configuration. You can enable or disable Hibernation, change sleep timeout, disk timeout, monitor time out, and all power configurations from the command prompt.
Set Hard Disk Timeout using PowerCFG command line
Press the Windows key, and type CMD until Command Prompt appears. Then, right-click on it, and choose to run with admin privileges. Then type the following command with <minutes> in number.
How long to wait before turning off disks while plugged in
powercfg -Change disk-timeout-ac <minutes>
or
powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e <seconds>
How long to wait before turning off disks while on battery
powercfg -Change disk-timeout-dc <minutes>
or
powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442 6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e <seconds>
If you use 0 (zero) minutes or seconds will be the same as “Never”. The Windows default data value is 1200 seconds or 20 minutes.
That said, you can create a shortcut of this and set this quickly. The other option is to save the command in notepad and save it as a BAT file.
If you want to change it through Windows Settings manually, it is available with the Advanced power configuration. Along with this, you can also change other factors through the user interface.
I hope you have learned how to quickly set hard disk timeout using the powercfg command line in Windows 11/10.
It is always a good idea to set up a timeout for the hard disk to increase its life, however, configure the timeout based on your work requirement. You do not want the disk to time out in the middle of something.
