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Selective Power Management

J

J-Mag

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 21, 2004
Messages
3,640
I am not sure if this belongs in here or in the OS / Software forums...

Anyway I have realized that I really don't need ALL my hard disks spinning. I am usually only using one or two at a time...

Is there a method to have your OS drive always on, but your data drives power down after an arbitrary (selectable) time?

With the current Power management I see in Win XP Pro, it only applies the power down setting to all the disk so far that I can tell.
 
Honestly, I wouldn't bother. Hard drives take up some energy sure, but having them spin down vs. run constantly amounts to like $10 a month on the energy bill if that, and constantly spinning down and up is a pain, plus it reduces the life of the drive.
 
Actually, Windows XP does spin down drives individually. The spindown timeout applies only to activity on each individual hard drive, so if you have a secondary storage hard drive that isn't be accessed as often as the main OS/Apps drive, then it will be spun down until it's accessed again.

I imagine that the savings of power isn't even $10/month for all the drives in a typical system. A typical hard drive is somewhere in the 10W range for power consumption when idle (spinning, but not seeking). If you ran a single hard drive for an entire month at the national average of $0.08/kwh it would cost about $0.58 to run the drive for an entire 30 day month.

Granted, there's no sense wasting any energy, though, it all starts to add up after a while. Plus most PATA/SATA drives are rated for 5day/8hours/day operation. Meaning if you put a long timeout on there you won't needlessly be spinning down the drive, but it will still turn off if you're not using the system for a long time and fit better with the intended PATA/SATA usage model.

Keep in mind also, that there is a fairly lengthy delay when you first try to access a drive that has been spun down. On my system, for example, my secondary drive takes about 10 seconds to spin up completely and access the requested data.
 
Also with regard to power consumption, the amount of power taken to spin a drive up is a good deal higher than 10W - I think I recall it's something around 50W for a few seconds of spinup. So this puts more load on your PSU, and could potentially overload it. It depends on your PSU, of course, but I'd avoid it as much as possible. Spinning up and down drives all the time could conceivably add wear and tear to them, too.

 
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