Hi guys,
I was hoping you might be able to help me or give me some advice:
I have 4 internal hard drives. I'd like to be able to "turn them off" selectively. In other words, I want my system drive to always remain spinning, but I'd like the other 3 to "turn off". I can't find any way to do this. Using Win 7's power options, I can turn off all drives after X minutes, but I can't ask it to leave my system drive on.
These are SATA drives in AHCI, so they are hot swappable. One option I've found is using the device manager to "disable" the selected drives. This turns them off until I manually "enable" them. Not an ideal situation at all.
Basically I have constraints on power and heat and I just don't use the other 3 drives very often. Seems I should be able to customize this somehow, but my Google is failing me.
ALSO: another related issue... which I fear may sidetrack the discussion from my main question: I've seen a lot of people talk about never turning off your hard disk because it just wears it out spinning up and all. But these comments are usually from the XP days when SATA was new. My current understanding is that modern HDs can be turned on and off without much fear of damage. So I guess what I'm saying is maybe I just shouldn't turn the HDs off EVER?
Thank you very much for your help and insights
I was hoping you might be able to help me or give me some advice:
I have 4 internal hard drives. I'd like to be able to "turn them off" selectively. In other words, I want my system drive to always remain spinning, but I'd like the other 3 to "turn off". I can't find any way to do this. Using Win 7's power options, I can turn off all drives after X minutes, but I can't ask it to leave my system drive on.
These are SATA drives in AHCI, so they are hot swappable. One option I've found is using the device manager to "disable" the selected drives. This turns them off until I manually "enable" them. Not an ideal situation at all.
Basically I have constraints on power and heat and I just don't use the other 3 drives very often. Seems I should be able to customize this somehow, but my Google is failing me.
ALSO: another related issue... which I fear may sidetrack the discussion from my main question: I've seen a lot of people talk about never turning off your hard disk because it just wears it out spinning up and all. But these comments are usually from the XP days when SATA was new. My current understanding is that modern HDs can be turned on and off without much fear of damage. So I guess what I'm saying is maybe I just shouldn't turn the HDs off EVER?
Thank you very much for your help and insights