Do you need to physically remove connections from a drive for no power consumption?

[Petros_K]

If you want to disable one of your hard drives, or other device, so that there are no watts being drawn from your power supply unit for the device, do you need to physically remove the AC connector on the device that connects it to the power supply unit?

I know how to disable devices in Windows device manager, but it's not clear when you do this if power will still go to the device at startup. If you tell me that you can disable a device in the BIOS so that no power is sent to the device at startup, please 1) provide details on how to do this, and 2) provide details on how to re-enable the device again. I'm a little shaky about making changes in my system's BIOS.

 

[getochkn]

Yes. Disabling it won't stop power draw. You can test this easily by just pulling off the SATA or IDE connector and just keep the drive powered. You can still feel the motor going.

 

[Petros_K]

So then to truly disable a device (for the sake of stopping the power consumption) you must first disable the device in Windows device manager, then turn off the computer, and then disconnect the AC connector for the device? Is this going to mess with your system's BIOS configuration in such a way that when you plug the device back in it won't be detected?

 

[getochkn]

You don't have to disable it from Windows, just shut down and pull the power on it. The BIOS should be fine.

Now are these IDE drives or SATA drives. It can mess things up with other drives if they are IDE drives and in things like Master/Slave mode, etc.

 

[Petros_K]

So the BIOS will update itself based on what is detected? I have ATA/IDE hard drives, but the jumpers are set for auto-detect. Shouldn't cause a problem, yes?