I bought a new Delock 3.5″ External Enclosure SATA HDD to USB 2.0 / eSATA for some backup SATA HDD drives that I keep around and everything works just fine, except that if I leave the drive to idle for 5 minutes (precisely 5 minutes), it gets powered down. The problem is that it takes around one minute for it to be powered back up, which completely confuses the operating system (Windows 7 x64) and causes all sorts of errors. One of the drives is a 1TB SATA Western Digital HDD (WD1001FALS-00E3A0).
Because I also tested it with a 500GB drive as well as on a different PC and it had the same behaviour, I will blame it on the enclosure itself. I searched online for similar issues, and even though I have the Intel(R) 5 Series 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller, disabling the HIPM / DIPM (AHCI Link Power Management) features does not change anything.
I used to have a Vantec NexStar CX enclosure for the same type of HDD, which I also connected to the same laptop via eSATA and it did not have this behavior.
Is there any way to disable this power management "feature"? I wasn't able to find any instructions from the manufacturer of the enclosure.
Best regards, Mihai Todor