Should internal HDD's power off at idle?

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kol12

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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Should internal HDD's (data only) power off at idle or are they constantly powered? I've discovered that the program HWiNFO if monitoring disk drives tends to keep the drive active... For the particular drive I'm questioning I can disable monitoring of it but how can I then verify if the drive is powered down? That's if internal HDD do power off at idle of course...
 
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Dark Falz

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Mar 8, 2015
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It's controlled by the Windows power settings (Turn off Hard Disks after n minutes).

You save power if you have data drives that you don't always access data off, but you need to wait for them to spin up if you do need to access them. It's debatable whether stop/start cycles wear out a HDD faster than constantly spinning. It's unlikely the OS drive will ever sleep as small amounts of data are being written to it regularly.
 
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kol12

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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Thanks, I suspected the Turn off Hard Disks after feature affected all hdd. Now that I've only just discovered that HWiNFO keeps disks active if monitoring them it's probable that my storage hdd has been constantly powered on for over an year as I tend to have HWiNFO running all of the time...

Most people seem to think turning the hdd off extends the life of the hdd, what's your opinion? As I frequently access the drive I think I will set it to 30-60 mins turn off as recommended by others to prevent lots of stop starts... That means that external backup drives would have the same turn off period but maybe that's ok. As far as I know it's possible to control individual drives...



 
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