How fast may your hard drive turn on and off?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Solution
ThatVietGuy
No, that's just idiotic. There's no way this will dramatically improve noise and power usage to justify shortening the life of your hard drive(s).

Most hard drives today are very quiet and consume an insignificant amount of power at idle. Turning them on and off will prove no benefit unless you have extremely sensitive hearing or are incredibly nitpicky about your power bill.
Sort by date Sort by votes
R

Ruben Cleenewerck

Honorable
Oct 20, 2013
61
0
10,630


i read once somewhere that it is bad for hard drives to constantly (in fast succsession) to turn on and off, and i'm here to hear the opinions of others so that i not accidently kill my hard drives
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
R

Ruben Cleenewerck

Honorable
Oct 20, 2013
61
0
10,630


the real situation this applies to is the turn off after this amount of min to reduce noise/ wat usage so would it normally be safe to turn the hard disk off after 1 min use and than use it again after 10 sec?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ThatVietGuy

ThatVietGuy

Titan
Nov 6, 2007
11,718
314
70,240
No, that's just idiotic. There's no way this will dramatically improve noise and power usage to justify shortening the life of your hard drive(s).

Most hard drives today are very quiet and consume an insignificant amount of power at idle. Turning them on and off will prove no benefit unless you have extremely sensitive hearing or are incredibly nitpicky about your power bill.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

Judicious
May 9, 2013
4,999
0
32,960
Uhmmm it doesn't actually turn 'off' when using it, I assume you mean when you power off your computer or power on the computer? It powers ON when the switch is pressed for ON the computer, as for OFF, that depends when Windows is done closing everything down nicely so no corruption occurs from a sudden 'shut off' with the power switch while the 'code' was still 'open' in Windows (the most likely cause of program corruption).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
R

Ruben Cleenewerck

Honorable
Oct 20, 2013
61
0
10,630


You can shut them off after some minutes of non activity, here is how to do it http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/140592-hard-drive-turn-off-hard-disk-after-idle-never.html
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

Judicious
May 9, 2013
4,999
0
32,960
Okay this is one of those out of the box thoughts as compared to reality. Windows by itself, and current systems, are low power usage unless we are discussing Servers, Server Farms, etc. (which that article would QUANTIFIABLY impact the overall power, heat and noise consumption on that scale) mainly but that was before the constant multitasking and 'less user maintenance' approach to the current Windows editions. These now demand MORE constant 'in the background' use of the HDD, like checking for patches, scanning files for Viruses, checking for new Tweets / FB entries etc. On the larger scale (as I mentioned) business was worried before on the costs because the 'machines' sat 'idle' while everyone was home 'asleep', that changed that now all these systems are Interconnected and available 24x7x365 and used 24x7x365 now too. So the need to 'idle' or 'power down' the drives has given way to 'constant accessibility' needed by them.

I really wouldn't concern yourself with this for your home simple PC, this is really not relative (example: by doing it you save .00002 Watts usage in a month, does this really impact your electric bill?) but for some home business people whom may have a mini-server or such they may benefit, but things like E-Coin mining would use alot MORE power by the GPUs then you would barely save with the HDD for example.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom