Advanced Power Settings - Sleep and Hard Drive Never Off?

[Dragonspider]

With in Advanced Power settings you can have Sleep enabled to what ever time you choose and you can select Hard Drives to Turn off Never.
I was wondering if selecting a Sleep option overrides setting the Hard Drives to never turn off? Maybe a silly question?
It seems that the system enters into full Sleep and perhaps it makes not since to have the hard drives On since there is nothing to access them. However, it is an SSD issue that I am trying to fine tune.
Now that I am typing this out it occurs to me that this Hard Drive setting is all hard drives in a system?
Does anyone know via registry or some other method to select only one Hard Drive to Never Turn Off?

Thanks. Hope I am being clear.

 

[Night Hawk]

What happens when entering the sleep mode is the drives will be turned off and the present state will be kept in memory until awakened. While the system is active the power scheme will prevent the drives from idling down after so many minutes with the never turn off setting applied.

With the turn off drives after the default 20minutes of inactivity that doesn't mean all drives turn off at the exact same time. I've never come across any reference for changing the power plan option for individual drives. But I can point you at the guide for the power plan settings with one instruction on drive settings to apply prior to entering the sleep mode. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/778-power-plan-settings-change.html

 

[Dragonspider]

I have sleep set to enable after 45 minutes of idle, yet hard disks set to never turn off. I was wondering if these setting are in conflict, that is after 45 minutes when the system sleeps it turns off the hard disk anyway. Seems like it does and it seems that the Advanced settings don't have rule outs.

 

[Night Hawk]

There's a difference between the sleep mode and hibernation mode. The sleep mode simply makes the system appear off while retaining the present state of the desktop like windows open will still be seen open once awakened.

For Hibernation that's where the power conservation plays a larger role. At times I may not even have the sleep mode option even set simply having everything set to never from being a bit busy! Otherwise it is set for 2yrs. in case I'm out for some time.

Typically the only drive you can turn off or have on all the time regardless of how each power plan is set and even when the system is off completely would be one in an external enclosure having it's own on/off switch. When having the plan settings to never all drives are effected unless you can introduce a mod to isolate a particular drive by a possible reg edit pointing to the drive letter assigned.

 

[Dragonspider]

As you mentioned, sleep saves state to memory thus snapping back to where you were. Does sleep state turn the hard disks off?

 

[logicearth]

...Does sleep state turn the hard disks off?

It turns everything off that is can. So yes.

 

[Night Hawk]

When clicking on sleep when going to shutdown I ended up simply leaving the system that way due to being up later then usual. "Everything was quiet and not a mouse was stirring!" would be the answer for that.

The only thing active acts like a temporary charge being stored in memory where you pick up where you left off since you simply see the desktop come right up rather then going through a full startup. But Windows is just that a large collection of apps loaded into the active ram to form a main gui that runs in the active ram. The sleep mode acts like a snapshot or image of the present state and stores in while the hardwares are down.