External Bitlocked drives keep going to sleep while encrypting or copying data

Question

Hello,
We have been working on a project that involves any drive with standing data to be encrypted. We are using BitLocker to encrypt these drives. We are now encrypting several hundred external drives. These drives can have close to 8TB of data on them so the encryption takes days. We are using passwords to unlock the external drives.
Lately, I think it started a couple months ago, some drives appear to be going to sleep and locking during encryption. When we unlock the drive the encryption continues but while the drive was locked the encryption was not progressing so the time to encrypt increases. I have also seen this while copying data too or between encrypted drives. We see this on multiple computers. I have made sure the USB's are not to sleep in Power Options.
Any ideas how we might be able to keep our external drives from locking themselves while they are basically in use?

Answer 1

Many users have started to state the same issue with some specific device makers. Some have confirmed similar symptoms on the following configuration:

-Dell E7450
-Samsung 850 PRO
-Microsoft AHCI drivers
-Bitlocker in eDrive mode

You can try out some troubleshooting steps posted by the users and see if that can help you with your condition.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/5607cd34-725e-4f2b-b786-f5ee67b9aa9e/windows-10-1607-hardware-bitlocker-edrive-wake-from-sleep-issue?forum=win10itprosecurity

Related threads:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance/bitlocker-with-edrive-results-in-system-not-waking/458a3167-3b5d-4f8c-9b90-3c56e7345a51

Hope this resolves your Query!!

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