1. Boot up your Wii U.
2. Go to settings.
3. Go to data management.
4. Press and hold down on the D-Pad for half a second.
5. While holding down down on the D-Pad, press and hold the + and - buttons and keep holding them until...
6. You see this prompt.
7. Select disable; you will be advised that this setting might consume more energy.
8. Done.
This is like the best thing ever and not the default action, and it works on any drive, even those pesky ones with no PC-side firmware controller disabling option. Now,
why would you ever want to do this? Simple:
Let's say you are playing a game in where you don't save often and the drive spins down. Then, an epic cutscene comes up and the game saves before a boss and instead of doing it and moving on, the game gets delayed, possibly even choppy, while the drive is spun up again to save your game. The threshold for some drives is as little as 5 minutes too, and spinning your drive up and down like that over the course of hours for multiple times is very less than optimal.
I am assuming this works like utilities like OS X's "keepdrivespinning", which tells the computer to check for something nonexistent it doesn't need to check for ever 4 minutes, just to prevent the drive from spinning down. Why this is not pimped out on the support site and why it's a hidden menu to begin with is pure horseshit. That being said, take 2 minutes to say so long to unneeded wake-up time!
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1029967
