Vista and Power Options

[cirial]

This is on Vista 32-bit Home Premium.. I am currently running the "High Performance" option since this is a gaming desktop which I also use everyday. I noticed that in the High Performance setting that it still turns off hard disks when they are inactive for 20 mins. Heres the question that I have to ask about this.. What would happen if Vista decides to turn off my hard disk while seeding something like torrents? ..or sending a rather large file to my jobs network server? Does it only turn off non-operating system hd's?

[dekard]

It will turn off all harddrives as needed, but not if they are being used. So, torrents seeding will prevent them from shutting off. Optionally, you could change the settings for that power profile to disable shutting them down at all.

[cirial]

Thats more or less what I thought would happen. Activity on the hard drives disables them from shutting down. However, if Vista decides to finally turn them off when they really arent active, would this sign me out of say.. AIM?

[Toytown]

No as soon as data is needed off the harddrive in question, then it will respin back up and load the data, if theres no activity after this for 20mins (or however long its set to in your power profile) then it will respin back down.

It should be absolutely transparent and not cause any problems whatsoever in any applications, the only time you should notice it, is if you decide to click on a drive or something, thats spun down, it can take 2-3 seconds for it to become responsive again (as it spins back up)

Normally having more memory and perhaps readyboost will reduce the amount of times it will need to access the drive (and spin back up), as the data needed could already be in memory.