How to set individual HDD power options ?

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?

Iona said:

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.

GeneO said:

Iona said:

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 :P 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 $$$.

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

gregrocker said:

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.

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.

gregrocker said:

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).

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.

gregrocker said:

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.