a way to manually shutdown a hard drive through software?

[bruincal]

Is there a way to manually turnoff a hard drive through software? For example, the OS can turn off the hard drive in hibernate/sleep mode. I have two hard drives, and I'd like to turn off the second drive manually without having to shut down, unplug power cable and stuff...

I just Windows XP, and both of my hard drives are Western Digital .. one 40gb and another 100gb at 7200rpm.

 

[AndyHui]

Hibernate effectively shuts off the system entirely....with the exception that everything in RAM is dumped to the hard drive. Win2K/WinXP simply reads that back into RAM when the system is powered on again.

Under sleep mode, there is still power going to the drive, even though it's not spinning.

There is no way that you can unplug a drive while the system is still running, unless it is a hot-swappable drive, at least, not under the current IDE standards. You should be able do that with one of the Serial ATA standard revisions.

 

[Calin]

I tried such thing, setting a hard drive as "removable". But it didn't worked - when the IDE cable was disconnected, system wait forever.
After reconnect, sometimes the system continued his work.
Anyway, I tried this only with Windows 98 (few years ago), not with Windows XP or 2000.
I don't think the Microsoft IDE driver will accept such thing

Calin