External drive, power up 24/7 ?

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I'm hopefully going to be sorting out an external drive using a WD5002ABYS RE3 in an Antec MX-1 enclosure. The enclosure has an on/off switch, should this be powered up 24/7 even when my PC is off, or switch it on before powering up PC and off again after the PC has shutdown?
 
yup

are you using esata or usb?

if you're using usb, you can add or remove it anytime from the pc
you can too with esata (if it shows up an the 'safely remove' hardware thing in taskbar -might need to be set as AHCI in bios


(don't set sata to ahci straight away, as you're main drive might not have the correct driver for it and could fail to load windows up, so be prepared to format incase you need to)
 
helmut, if it's not set as ahci in the bios, and doesn't have the safely remove icon. can you just plug it in at anytime? (it's a question, not a 'you're wrong' comment)
 
helmut, if it's not set as ahci in the bios, and doesn't have the safely remove icon. can you just plug it in at anytime? (it's a question, not a 'you're wrong' comment)

I am on a Nvidia Mobo, I dont need bother/mess with ACHI. ;)

I also do not mess with customer builds (recently P45's) with Externals so no clue, I just install windows in ACHI mode anyhow.
 
Yes the "MY Book" is in the Safely Remove Hardware Window for me which is only needed if you enable Write Caching (Optimise For Performance), if not you can plug/unplug it like a USB Stick once its stopped Reading/Writing.
 
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