Software to keep secondary hard drive powered down.

[chrisr]

After building a new system with silence in mind, I noticed that the hard drive was by far the noisiest component. I purchased a quiet hard drive to act as my primary drive and am using the much larger and louder drive for simple file storage.

Under "Power Options" in the XP Control Panel, I set "Turn off hard disks" to 3 minites. So after 3 minutes of idle, this drive should power off and stay powered off until I'm ready to use it again. However, the drive randomly powers on and then 3 minutes later, powers off again. I have turned off indexing for the drive in the hopes that this would solve the problem, but it didn't help.

Does anyone know of a software solution that would allow me to turn off power to this drive until I tell it to turn back on? If I don't find something soon, I'll have to buy an external enclosure for it and only plug it in when I need it.

 

[oldpablo]

Your antivirus probably scans it or windows update caches files to it or something. You could always disable it (take away drive letter) in Windows Disk Management until you need it. No data is lost, it just temporarily makes it inacessible to Windows. Then when you need it just give it a drive letter again.

 

[chrisr]

Great idea, thanks. I'm trying it now.

 

[djnes]

The BIOS controls the power up/power down, so as soon as you turn on your PC, it will power up. Your either going to have to stick it in an external case, or get a switch for the drive. Directron sells one for $5 that will let you mount the switch somewhere on the case. I have several of them I use for CCFLs.