How to put an individual USB port to sleep?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

Hi, I have a few external drives that i don't always use and want to be able to have them shutdown when i am not using them. They shutdown when the computer goes into sleep mode but I would like to be able to make them shutdown (and power up) without putting the whole computer to sleep.

So I was wondering if there is a way to make a usb device think the port its plugged into is asleep in Win7 x64. Any ideas would really be appreciated!

Cheers,

-Gaiko

 

[nhasian]

if you put the usb port to sleep you will cause file system errors on the external hard disks when data is not written before they are removed from the system.

you should simply go to the control panel and under power management you can tell the hard disks to spin down after x number of mins. I'm not sure if this works on usb hard disks though but I can tell you that my 3.5" 1 TB Western Digital external drive automatically powers itself down after a certain amount of time.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You can also go to the "safely remove hardware" in the bottom right and have it disconnect the drive at which point you can just power it off.