External HDD spins and stops repeatedly

Yesterday I connected my 3TB WD My Book Essential to my XBox One S and transferred all games to it. It works perfectly when I play games! Unfortunately when I turn off the console the external drive constantly spins and turns off approximately every 20 seconds or so. The console is off so why does the external drive even start to spin? Prior to connecting this drive to the console it was connected to NAS. It was working very well and the health status is OK also. I checked it and there are no bad sectors or anything like that.

I don’t have an Xbox One s … but from googling the problem there have been lots of reports about it.

Even though the console is “off” it’s still supplying power to the usb

One suggestion from a post i saw … Set your console to actually power off rather than sit in Instant On mode. This work for me… it turns everything off, including the external HD

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/xbox-one-and-external-hard-drive-not-going-to/275d8a5e-e6dc-4ebc-b21b-71d929362064

But some (lots) people have said this does not solve the problem

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/external-hard-drive-not-turning-off-when-i-turn/2b16dc4a-45ad-4b78-bab9-eb2e59d614fe

Dunno, if the Hard drive worked fine with the NAS … i suspect the Xbox is to blame for the problem ?

Thank you for taking the time for doing this research and posting those links. I also looked in Microsoft forum but I did not find those. You are very helpful. I will try the suggested things in those posts tonight and report back here.

EDIT: In System > Settings > Power & startup > Power mode & startup
I tried:

  1. Power mode set to Instant-on and select the option When Xbox is off , turn off storage
  2. Power mode set to Energy-saving

None of these worked and the external hdd still spins up and down constantly.

But when I did:
Turn off or restart > Full shutdown
The external hard drive finally turned off and staid off.
This is not ideal because when you turn the console on you have to wait really long time for loading.
I don’t understand why there is an option for turning off storage and it is not working at all. But hey - it’s made by Microsoft after all, so bugs are expected :slight_smile: