How to turn off one of my hard drives?

robertocp25 · Jan 25, 2016

I have 2 hard drives one ssd and one hdd i would like too know if i can turn the hdd from the windows, i mean turn it off totally and start whenever i want. Theres any software to do that?

Paul NZ · Jan 25, 2016

No. Unplug it, plug it back in usually works

thor220 · Jan 25, 2016

The best that you can do on windows is set the sleep timer in the power options.

blazorthon · Jan 25, 2016

Not really. The power supply, hard drive, and software would all need to support something like that and generally, they don't for consumer systems.

Some hard drives can spin down when idle, but I am not aware of a setup where you can do this manually in a consumer computer. You could hardmod a switch into the SATA power into the hard drive, assuming the motherboard supports SATA hot plugging. I don't think you can do this entirely in software.

robertocp25 · Jan 25, 2016

blazorthon :

I use the windows power options and it almost stops so its good enough for me

robertocp25 · Jan 25, 2016

thor220 :

Reduce the time to 1 minute and it stops spining alot after that so i got a quiet pc thank you

thor220 · Jan 25, 2016

robertocp25 :

No problem at all. Putting the drives to sleep is almost as good as off although it will consume a fraction of a watt in that mode (depending on the HDD). You could implement a full off mode by installing a hot-swap bay, which usually come with an on/off button.

blazorthon · Jan 26, 2016

Keep in mind that this will reduce the lifetime of the hard drive somewhat because it greatly increases the number of spin up/spin down cycles per day past what it was made for. Unlike laptop drives, most desktop drives are not made for this (with the exception of many Western Digital models).

thor220 · Jan 26, 2016

blazorthon :

*may reduce

You have to assume he's actually using the drive allot. If he's genuinely not using the drive much, the amount of times the drive is parking won't increase much. There's also on statistic that shows that parking the drive allot will result in decreased drive life across all manufacturer brands.

blazorthon · Jan 26, 2016

Not may, will. It will reduce it as you said in your last sentence. How much varies, but that it happens is not in doubt.

If drive sleep is set to 1 minute, I imagine there will be a lot of parking cycles every time he uses it.

Western Digital's Intellipower drives are made to handle this, as are laptop drives and a few other models. Although parking reduces the life span of all drives, not all drives are equally affected. These listed drives are made for it they can handle it much better. It can be the difference between a drive failing after 5,000 cycles and 50,000 cycles, just as an example.

thor220 · Jan 26, 2016

blazorthon :

Not may, will. It will reduce it as you said in your last sentence. How much varies, but that it happens is not in doubt.

If drive sleep is set to 1 minute, I imagine there will be a lot of parking cycles every time he uses it.

Western Digital's Intellipower drives are made to handle this, as are laptop drives and a few other models. Although parking reduces the life span of all drives, not all drives are equally affected. These listed drives are made for it they can handle it much better. It can be the difference between a drive failing after 5,000 cycles and 50,000 cycles, just as an example.

Can you provide a source for this info?

blazorthon · Jan 28, 2016

Here are some links with others stating this, in the mean time I'll try to find something more concrete to prove it:
http://superuser.com/questions/197862/how-harmful-is-a-hard-disk-spin-cycle
quote:

For one particular drive (a WD Scorpio Blue 2.5") a start-stop count of ~200,000 or a load-cycle count of ~600,000 corresponds to SMART value 0 (i.e. the disk is at the end of its life according to SMART). (This is a laptop drive, they are made to handle a larger number of spindowns than desktop drives are.)

As these values come from the manufacturer, I assume they represent the manufacturer's best guesstimate for what their drives can handle. Lacking independent data, I'd be inclined to think that the manufacturer's guess is probably better than mine, so you could probably do worse than using those numbers in calculating the X.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=752321
quote:

Well, the iPod uses a laptop HD, which are designed for more spinup/down cycles than desktop HD's. It must do that for battery conservation. Otherwise, running the HD continuously would kill the batterys in short order, compared to spinning it down. As for the number of cycles a laptop HD is designed for, i'm not so sure..

As some other posts note, it is also not good to run a disk 24/7 either because once you do stop the disk, it can get stuck, but that's a different problem and is more common with servers and data centers (where, unsurprisingly, the disks are also not rated for a large number of spin up/spin down cycles). Laptop drives are made to handle spin cycles better than desktop drives because manufacturers expect laptop drives to experience more cycles since they are turned off and on more often, or at least put to sleep more often (for the regular user).

Certain desktop drives are similarly made to handle it better. Western Digital does this with some of their higher efficiency drives, such as their Red and especially their Green drives. Note that this does not carry over to drives that lack the eco features such as the Blue, Black, and VelociRaptor drives which handle spin cycles the same as any other manufacturers' desktop hard drives of similar specifications.

thor220 · Jan 28, 2016

blazorthon :

Here are some links with others stating this, in the mean time I'll try to find something more concrete to prove it:
http://superuser.com/questions/197862/how-harmful-is-a-hard-disk-spin-cycle
quote:

For one particular drive (a WD Scorpio Blue 2.5") a start-stop count of ~200,000 or a load-cycle count of ~600,000 corresponds to SMART value 0 (i.e. the disk is at the end of its life according to SMART). (This is a laptop drive, they are made to handle a larger number of spindowns than desktop drives are.)

As these values come from the manufacturer, I assume they represent the manufacturer's best guesstimate for what their drives can handle. Lacking independent data, I'd be inclined to think that the manufacturer's guess is probably better than mine, so you could probably do worse than using those numbers in calculating the X.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=752321
quote:

Well, the iPod uses a laptop HD, which are designed for more spinup/down cycles than desktop HD's. It must do that for battery conservation. Otherwise, running the HD continuously would kill the batterys in short order, compared to spinning it down. As for the number of cycles a laptop HD is designed for, i'm not so sure..

As some other posts note, it is also not good to run a disk 24/7 either because once you do stop the disk, it can get stuck, but that's a different problem and is more common with servers and data centers (where, unsurprisingly, the disks are also not rated for a large number of spin up/spin down cycles). Laptop drives are made to handle spin cycles better than desktop drives because manufacturers expect laptop drives to experience more cycles since they are turned off and on more often, or at least put to sleep more often (for the regular user).

Certain desktop drives are similarly made to handle it better. Western Digital does this with some of their higher efficiency drives, such as their Red and especially their Green drives. Note that this does not carry over to drives that lack the eco features such as the Blue, Black, and VelociRaptor drives which handle spin cycles the same as any other manufacturers' desktop hard drives of similar specifications.

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely need to see something more concrete before I can conclude that drive spin-up can effect a drive's health. In the first link users had quoted google's datacenter information saying that drives with high spin-up cycles only had an effect on 2% of drives over 3 years old. 2% over 3 years isn't much of an effect at all spread across a wide swath of drives and considering that these were in a server environment, it's possible that other factors could have lead to the drive's demise.

blazorthon · Jan 28, 2016

Something you should keep in mind is that a 2% raise in failure rates for those drives is rather significant when the failure rates are already fairly low. Also, as you mention, those were server drives which have plenty of other problems. The study attributed that 2% specifically to the spin up and down cycles wearing down the drives. Desktop drives with aggressive sleep modes will see far fewer of the issues like huge heat and 24/7 usage (of course), but proportionally higher failures to be attributable to the spin cycles.

Of course, were still talking a semi-long term effect and its a statistic, so one drive might last ten days while another lasts ten years while an average is around say three years. I can only say that on average, more spin cycles will reduce the lifetime of the drive because it does wear out the drive a bit and at the very least, the study does back up that claim.

More to come later when I get better links.

thor220 · Jan 30, 2016

I do think it's safe to say that obsessive spining up will wear out the mechanics the same as any other device. The user in this thread simply wants a drive to spin-down quickly because the drive is seldom used.

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