Spinning down individual hard disks

Man of Honour
Joined
4 Nov 2002
Posts
15,511
Location
West Berkshire
I don't use all the disks in my PCs all the time, so I'd like to spin down the ones that don't get used much. I don't want to use power management to do this as that applies to all disks, and regular spin down/up cycles puts extra strain on the hardware.

Anyone got any ideas? I found some really old shareware that might work, but I'd prefer free if possible. After all, I can do this in Linux for free. :)
 
Linux users can use hdparm -S to set the standby time for individual disks. Works a treat. :)

As for Windows, I found a program called hdsleep that's supposed to work, but (a) it was written in 1999, (b) I could only find a shareware version, (c) the guy who wrote it has disappeared from the web, and (d) there are reports it doesn't work on WinXP anyway.
 
I think this is because the world has moved away from mechanical disks, therefore, spin up/spin down is not a thing for modern disks in W10, or any other OS for that matter.
 
I think this is because the world has moved away from mechanical disks, therefore, spin up/spin down is not a thing for modern disks in W10, or any other OS for that matter.

Any reason you've necro'd a 14 year old thread?

From my experience/understanding I don't think you can completely shut off a disk, most manufacturers firmware will spin the disks periodically to ensure all the moving parts still work. If it didn't do this then on an occasion the OS wants to write to disk, it would fail to spin up and have to return an error to the OS to say write failed.
 
Any reason you've necro'd a 14 year old thread?

From my experience/understanding I don't think you can completely shut off a disk, most manufacturers firmware will spin the disks periodically to ensure all the moving parts still work. If it didn't do this then on an occasion the OS wants to write to disk, it would fail to spin up and have to return an error to the OS to say write failed.

Wow, no idea, it was near the top of page one the other day. :eek:
 
I don't use all the disks in my PCs all the time, so I'd like to spin down the ones that don't get used much. I don't want to use power management to do this as that applies to all disks, and regular spin down/up cycles puts extra strain on the hardware.

Anyone got any ideas? I found some really old shareware that might work, but I'd prefer free if possible. After all, I can do this in Linux for free. :)

Just take the disk Offline in Disk Management - it's what I do with a couple of 6TB internal drives - they only spin up when set back to Online.

Edit: yikes didn't see the OP date, guess Django is just bored :D
 
Back
Top Bottom