How to prevent ONE hard drive from spinning down?

[Marty McFly]

My computer contains one SSD + four noisy HDDs that I don't use very often (mostly just storage and backup).

To keep my computer quiet and prevent wear & tear, I've set my Power Options to spin down the drives after 20 minutes

The problem is that it also spins down my D drive - where I keep my Desktop, all my work, and stuff I use all the time. I hate having to wait for this to spin up!

Is there any way to turn off power saving for JUST ONE DRIVE?

I found a tutorial to do this for Windows 8 (https://superuser.com/questions/613...individual-power-settings-for-each-hard-drive) which adds a "MinimumIdleTimeoutInMS" to the registry. But these instructions didn't work for me in Windows 7. Only 3 of my 5 hard drives showed up in the list, and I couldn't even tell which was which!

 

[Paul Black]

Hi Marty McFly,

Perhaps to help us you could post a screenshot of your Disk Management?

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

I hope this helps!

 

[Marty McFly]

Perhaps to help us you could post a screenshot of your Disk Management?

No problem:

 

[Paul Black]

Hi Marty McFly,

Obviously if a HDD contains two partitions then both partitions would be put to sleep.
What HDD do you want to put to sleep?

I hope this helps!

 

[Paul Black]

Hi Marty McFly,

Does this help: Windows 7 - How can I force an internal hard drive to power on or off.

I hope this helps!

 

[Marty McFly]

Does this help: Windows 7 - How can I force an internal hard drive to power on or off.

Thank you for your help, but that did not give me a solution, sorry.

Obviously if a HDD contains two partitions then both partitions would be put to sleep.
What HDD do you want to put to sleep?

I already have set all my drives to go to sleep after 20 minutes. Except I don't want my SSD to ever sleep. There are two partitions on it C: (my system drive) and D: (my work drive).


C: Never seems to sleep, but D: does sleep if I don't access my work for 20 minutes.

 

[Megahertz07]

As you mentioned, C: and D: are partitions of a SSD. SSD's don't have moving parts so C: and / or D: don't "spin up".
Don't understand your problem.

 

[Marty McFly]

As you mentioned, C: and D: are partitions of a SSD. SSD's don't have moving parts so C: and / or D: don't "spin up".
Don't understand your problem.

Well sometimes if I try to access my D drive (on the SSD) - and I haven't accessed it for a while - it will hang for about 7 seconds before responding.

That only started happening recently since I set my drives to be put to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity.

For reference, my SSD is the OCZ ARC-100 480GB SSD