Hard disk manual spin-down

[WildW]

Is there any way to tell a hard disk to dismount and power off in Windows 7?

I have an occasionally used drive that's a bit noisy. At the moment if I want to use it I shut down, connect power and sata cable, and reboot. . . not the most elegant method, but I use it infrequently enough to live with it.

My experience of telling Windows to power down drives after an idle period isn't great. They will often restart again randomly when some program or service gets bored and fancies accessing it. Am I right in thinking that you still can't set different idle times for different drives? I don't want to power off my boot drive after a couple of minutes idle, but I don't want to wait 10 minutes for the noisy drive to shut up!

 

[Nothinman]

AFAIK you've got it right. Windows won't let you specify separate spin down times for each drive and even then any time an app enumerates the drives in the system it'll almost always cause a spin up of all of them.

Your best work around is probably to get an external enclosure and put it in there so you can hot unplug it when you're done with it.

 

[Rifter]

yeah cutting the power when you dont need it is the best idea.

 

[zagood]

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Be sure to identify your OS drive and any drives other than the one you want to spin down as "non-hotswappable."

 

[WildW]

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Be sure to identify your OS drive and any drives other than the one you want to spin down as "non-hotswappable."

My word, that is freaking awesome =D

 

[zagood]

Yeah, pretty handy piece of software. Hope it does what you want it to do.

 

[WildW]

Yep - once I found that the auto-detect option would turn drives back on again. Fortunately I only have one drive I want to spin up/down so it works well =) Thanks much.

 

[Zap]

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Be sure to identify your OS drive and any drives other than the one you want to spin down as "non-hotswappable."

Bookmarked for future reference.

 

[deimos3428]

I was gonna mumble something about eSATA, but that looks better.

 

[WildW]

The beauty of software in this case is that it cost nothing =)