How to change hard drive shutdown after idle time in Windows 11

While hard drives are more readily available and faster these days, they still end up consuming a lot of power, especially on laptops. The hard drive consumes more power and ends up draining the laptop's battery faster than it should, so users prefer to turn off the hard drive after idle time. This feature was introduced in the power management options of Windows 10 and helps extend the battery life of your laptop.

While it may be enabled automatically on systems with a Balanced Power Plan or a Power Saver Plan, you can also turn this feature on manually. This will shut down the hard drive whenever your PC is idle for the selected period of time. This, in turn, will automatically use less power, saving your laptop's battery life. However, when you want to get back to using your PC, this can cause a delay in the hard drive booting up and it suddenly realizing it needs to wake up and start working.

Nonetheless, there have been no reports of this feature having any adverse impact on PC performance, so you can turn off the hard drive after the idle time option. However, sometimes you may also want to change the time this feature will turn off the hard drive after idle time changes, for example from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. In this case, you can follow the method we show you here.

Method 1: Via Power Options

This method helps you turn off the hard drive through Power Options in Control Panel after idle time in Windows 11. You can also turn off the hard drive after changing the idle time from the same location. Let's see how:

Step 1: Press the Win R keys simultaneously on your PC to open the "Run Command" window.

Step 2: In the Run Command window, type POWERCFG.CPL in the text field and press Enter to open the Power Options window in Control Panel.

Step 3: In the Control Panel window, navigate to the right and go to Power Plans.

Here, click the Change Plan Settings link next to Active Power Plans on your system.

Step 4: In the next window (Edit plan settings), go to the bottom of the window and click Change advanced power settings.

Step 5: It will open the Power Options window.

Here, under the Advanced Settings tab, go to the list and expand the Hard Disk option.

Now, click to expand the "Turn off the hard drive after" option.

Next, change the time of the On battery field and Plugged in field.

When finished, press Apply and then OK to save changes and exit.

Close the control panel window and the hard drive should now shut down after the idle time you set.

Method 2: Via Command Prompt

However, if you change to a faster way of shutting down the hard drive after idle time, you can use Command Prompt. Follow the instructions below to make changes via the command line:

Step 1: Go to Start, right-click on it and select Run.

Step 2: It will open the “Run” command window.

In the search field, type cmd and press the Ctrl Shift Enter key simultaneously to open a Command Prompt window with administrator privileges.

Step 3: In an elevated command prompt window, run the following command and press Enter:

powercfg -change -disk-timeout-dc 0

Now, replace the 0 with what you want The number of minutes after which the hard drive is disabled after idle time.

Step 4: Now, run the following command in the command prompt and press Enter:

powercfg -change-disk-timeout-ac-0

Replace 0 with the number of minutes you want the hard drive to be disabled after idle time

Once completed, close the command prompt window, restart your PC, and now, next time your PC is idle, the hard drive will shut down within the specified time.

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