External Hard Drive keeps disconnecting

[Devhux]

This one's starting to really annoy me.

I have a powered Western Digital My Book external hard drive plugged into a powered Anker USB 3.0 Hub. This is in turn connected to my Surface Pro 4's USB port.

For some reason, when the screen shuts off, the drive gets momentarily disconnected, and any transfers I'm doing get dropped as a result (for example, transferring data to my NAS). The screen turning off seems to be the trigger, as I've gone and disabled Connected Standby, USB Selective Suspend, even configured the USB hub to not shut off to save power in device manager.

I've now turned off the screen timeout for now to see if that fixes the issue,but otherwise I'm stumped.

Any ideas?

 

[jmshub]

Try going into the Control Panel, then go into Device Manager. Click on the arrow to expand the Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Find the one that powers your USB hub and hard drive. Double click on it and it will open up a new window. Go over to the tab that says Power Management. Uncheck the box that says Allow Windows to Turn off Device to Save Power. Click OK and close the window. See if that helps.

 

[Devhux]

I might have forgotten one of the USB controllers when I tried that earlier. We'll see how things go.

 

[Devhux]

......Nope.

Still doing it. Maybe my USB hub is acting up.

 

[Great deal]

I have had this issue for soo long, any resolutions out there?

 

[at1000]

Yup gotta a fix. I have 2 Silicon Power 1Tb A60 drives, both no problem on my old HP laptop, but on my Surface Pro 4 both would go on and off. I went through all the power management ideas and some registry ones with no success. I got rid of the SP4, and got a SP6, same issue! (now windows 10 home not pro, out of the box).
I checked the event details in the driver in device manager, googled that fault, and it says it means drive not recognised and to update drivers (despite correct name in device manager). So right click update no change. I go to the Silicon Power website and there is a firmware update for the drive (as in loaded on the drive not on the PC).
No issues now, problem is gone.
So look around for a update for the drive!