Setting power save options individually per drive in Windows?

[John2000]

Hi,

I'd like to have the following power save setting in Windows 7:

HDD 1: Never turn off drive.
HDD 2: Turn off drive after X minutes of inactivity.

The reason is that I want instant access to HDD 1 so it should always be turned on. But HDD 2 is only used once a week or month during backups, so it should be turned off when not used.

However, the only setting I can find in Windows is under Advanced Power Options, and it applies to all hard drives. I.e. either all drives have the setting "Never turn off", or all drives have the setting "Turn off drive after X minutes of inactivity".

So is there some other way that I can set this setting individually per drive, as described above? Can it e.g. be done in the Windows registry, using some other Windows tool, or via a utility provided by the hard drive manufacturer (Western Digital in this case)?

Thanks!

 

[evilsofa]

Windows doesn't do that.

Most hard drives have a spin-down timer, where they will spin down after a certain time of inactivity. This is controlled by the hard drive, not the OS. Certain ones do this very frequently, in as few as four seconds, which results in complaints from users about the noise they make whenever it spins down.

If you actually want it powered completely off, your only real option is to put it in an external drive closure and only plug it in when you need it. Having your backup drive not in the same location as the rest of your PC is a good thing.

 

[John2000]

Windows doesn't do that.

Most hard drives have a spin-down timer, where they will spin down after a certain time of inactivity. This is controlled by the hard drive, not the OS. Certain ones do this very frequently, in as few as four seconds, which results in complaints from users about the noise they make whenever it spins down.

Do you know if it is possible to set that spin down time per individual drive on Western Digital Red or Green drives?

If you actually want it powered completely off, your only real option is to put it in an external drive closure and only plug it in when you need it. Having your backup drive not in the same location as the rest of your PC is a good thing.

Yes, and I intend to have an external drive as well that I attach manually and back up to every 3-6 months. But since it's a bit of a hassle having to do that manually every time, I also intend to back up to the internal HDD-2 drive more frequently without requiring any manual steps. But I want it to be shut down (or at least spin down) when not used.

 

[evilsofa]

By default, WD Greens will spin down after 8 seconds of idle time. Some WD Reds spin down after 300 seconds, and some spin down after 8 seconds (they had a firmware bug for awhile).

You can mess around with this setting with a DOS app called wdidle3.exe but in your particular case it's best if you don't, since you actually do not want to turn it off.

 

[John2000]

By default, WD Greens will spin down after 8 seconds of idle time. Some WD Reds spin down after 300 seconds, and some spin down after 8 seconds (they had a firmware bug for awhile).

You can mess around with this setting with a DOS app called wdidle3.exe but in your particular case it's best if you don't, since you actually do not want to turn it off.

8 to 300 seconds spin down time - isn't that kind of short for a driver that is supposed to be used for NAS / file server duty? Or is the spin up time so short (some 100 milliseconds?) that you will not notice it much when accessing it anyway?

 

[crawfish]

You guys are talking about the head parking AKA load/unload cycle issue, and that is what wdidle3 controls. Internal drives don't go and spin down on their own, fer crying out loud.

To the OP: Windows does not support controlling hard drive spin down on a per-drive basis AFAIK. It's all or nothing.

 

[drescherjm]

Internal drives don't go and spin down on their own, fer crying out loud.

Dives do have the ability to do this on their own although I have never tried this on windows.

In linux you can set the standby time on each drive individually and this has nothing to do with the OS you send the spin down parameter ATA directly to the drive with a program called hdparm

    -S     Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.  This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how long to
              wait  (with  no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.  Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a
              subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker.  The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar.  A value of zero means "timeouts are  disabled":
              the  device  will  not automatically enter standby mode.  Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.  Values
              from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.  A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes.  A  value
              of  253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved.  255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.  Note that some
              older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

 

[maxm]

If you put your pagefile on HDD1, that should prevent it from spinning down.

Alternatively, if you can connect HDD2 with a SATA HBA while leaving HDD1 on a MOBO port, you can try disabling HDD power management in your MOBO bios and HDD1 shouldn't ever spin down.

 

[crawfish]

Dives do have the ability to do this on their own although I have never tried this on windows.

You would have to configure it. It's not an innate feature enabled by default, unlike the load/unload cycle (mis)feature those guys were confusing it with.

 

[jabbernotty]

Do you have other backups?
Because this does not seem very robust to Cryptolocker-like situations, or user error.