How to set individual HDD power options ?

[Iona]

I want to set:
HDD 1 - never sleep
HDD 2 - never sleep
HDD 3 - sleep after 1h of inactivity
HDD 4 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity
HDD 5 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity

Any chance windows 7 can do it?

 

[indianacarnie]

Welcome to the forums!

Are these internals or externals? If internal or usb powered externals they will go to sleep when your computer does. I must admit I don't really understand your question though.

 

[GeneO]

I want to set:
HDD 1 - never sleep
HDD 2 - never sleep
HDD 3 - sleep after 1h of inactivity
HDD 4 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity
HDD 5 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity

Any chance windows 7 can do it?

Not to my knowledge - no. There is one global drive spin down setting in power management.

 

[Iona]

I want to set:
HDD 1 - never sleep
HDD 2 - never sleep
HDD 3 - sleep after 1h of inactivity
HDD 4 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity
HDD 5 - sleep after 20mins of inactivity

Any chance windows 7 can do it?

Not to my knowledge - no. There is one global drive spin down setting in power management.

Yeah i found just 1 global option for HDD sleep/spin down. Wonder if win 8 have it But i don't think it do. Maybe there will be some support for this in 10 years or never.
Typical lack of options from MS product worth billions of $$$.

 

[gregrocker]

What reason is there for different HD's operating under the same OS to sleep at different times?

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

What reason is there for different HD's operating under the same OS to sleep at different times?

In my case, it would be to cut down on power consumption and wear and tear on drives that are rarely accessed. There is no point in spinning a drive that isn't going to be used. On the flip side, you don't want to have to keep spinning up a drive that is used frequently. In the machine I'm building, I would like to be able to keep the main HDD spinning at all times but idle the HDDs that I'm going to store videos on except when I need to access the drive to put a video on it or to watch one.

 

[gregrocker]

Can you use it as you want if you have the OS sleep with the HD's powered down? In other words, can you wake up the system as remotely as you might want to be to start a video?

You can try this with your current system by setting Sleep with no Hibernate, HD's to spin down just before sleep.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Can you use it as you want if you have the OS sleep with the HD's powered down? In other words, can you wake up the system as remotely as you might want to be to start a video?

You can try this with your current system by setting Sleep with no Hibernate, HD's to spin down just before sleep.

Besides not being sure I understand what you are saying, I wouldn't know how to do that (yet, since I'm hoping you will explain; just keep it simple for this computer challenged old lady).

 

[gregrocker]

In Advanced Power Options you can set HD to Turn Off a few minutes before it sleeps, then set Sleep to a desired time out.

I was asking if it will wake up if you're maintaining a Home Theater setup where you want to access and play videos remotely. You'll have to test it to see. You can enable Wake timers to see if that helps.

If you don't need it to wake up remotely then it should be fine with all HD's sleeping with Win7.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

In Advanced Power Options you can set HD to Turn Off a few minutes before it sleeps, then set Sleep to a desired time out.

I was asking if it will wake up if you're maintaining a Home Theater setup where you want to access and play videos remotely. You'll have to test it to see. You can enable Wake timers to see if that helps.

If you don't need it to wake up remotely then it should be fine with all HD's sleeping with Win7.

Ok, I don't see what advantage that would be while using the computer. I would need the main HDD (and, obviously, the boot drive although SDDs aren't exactly supposed to spin) spinning most of the time since I get on and off the computer frequently during the day (and frequently run processes at night while in bed) and the amount of time I spend there can vary just a minute or two to look up something to hours at a time. During the time the main HDD is spinning, the video storage HHDs don't need to be spinning unless actually watching a video, which would be a small percentage of the time the main HDD is a whirling dervish, and, even then, only one of the video drives needs to be spun up.

 

[gregrocker]

This is why I asked if you considered Sleep an option, as some cannot tolerate the few seconds it takes to wake from Sleep - even though this feature along with Hibernate are perfected in Win7 and offer great convenience.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Its not so much the time to wake up from sleep (computers do it much faster than I do!), it's the unnecessary drives spinning while the computer is being used for long periods that is the problem (difficult old bi...broad, aren't I?).

 

[p1tcho0]

What reason is there for different HD's operating under the same OS to sleep at different times?

Good question and about this tread, if we put as never sleep it will degrade the hdd huh ?

 

[gregrocker]

What wears a HD is read/writes so having it idle vs. sleep may not really age it much unless its staying hot which also always wears parts.

Sleep is more a convenience which happens to be perfected in Win7, so that I can walk away from my work and after 30 minutes it sleeps which I can wake up quickly by pressing Enter. Then if I'm away for an hour it writes everything to HD and shuts down using Hibernate, which also resumes much quicker from the Power Button with everything exactly as I left it out on the desktop. So I can walk away whether I come back in an hour or a month and my work is preserved.

Someone else may know a way to achieve exactly what Lady wants.

 

[Indianatone]

I have all my 6 drives in this machine and 5 in the other to power down after 20 mins. I don't know the answer to this, if I then access the drive with My Music on it that drive will spin up, do all the other drives power up too? If they remain asleep then that should be the answer to the OP issue.

 

[GRAHAM3D]

I have a mixture of different SSD and mechanical internal hard drives.
The SSD's are on RAID 0 and the 3 mechanical 2GB drives are used for back up.
I have read that I should set the Power Options for the SSD to "Turn off hard disk after" = Never.
But I still want the back up disks to turn off after 15 minutes.
Is there a way I can do this?

 

[GRAHAM3D]

Turn off hard disk after.. with SSD and spinning disk drives?

I have a mixture of different SSD and mechanical internal hard drives.
The SSD's are on RAID 0 and the 3 mechanical 2GB drives are used for back up.
I have read that I should set the Power Options for the SSD to "Turn off hard disk after" = Never.
But I still want the back up disks to turn off after 15 minutes.
Is there a way I can do this?

 

[carwiz]

No. Individual drive settings are not provided. However; if you have "green" drives, they will auto-sleep if not active. WD has a line of green drives that do just that. Even the label is green. The downside is that they are generally slower and the larger drives may take up to 13 seconds to spin up and respond. Perhaps that doesn't matter for a drive that isn't used much.

 

[GRAHAM3D]

Thanks.
So should I set the "Turn off drive after" to "never" or leave it at 15 minutes?

 

[carwiz]

Your choice. I don't know how you use your PC. The green drives work independent of any system settings. It's in the drive's firmware. They have their own stepped shutdown procedure. That's why the "green" drives should NEVER be used for Windows system files.